is-this-passive-aggressive 😤

Paste an email, Slack message or text. Get its passive-aggressive phrases decoded into what they actually mean — with zero AI.

“Per my last email” → you ignored my last email. “No rush, but…” → rush. “Noted.” → I disagree and I’m done discussing it. “Looping in your manager” → I’m escalating because you didn’t respond.

A tiny, 100% local, rule-based tool that scans a message against a curated database of corporate passive-aggression, scores its venom 0–100, and tells you — for each phrase — what they really mean. No API key, no model, nothing leaves your machine.

🌐 Try it in your browser →

Paste a message, watch the venom light up. Nothing is uploaded — the whole engine runs client-side.

npx is-this-passive-aggressive "Per my last email, please advise. No rush, but I need this today."

  100/100 ████████████████████ Weapons-grade passive-aggressive ☠️
  3 passive-aggressive phrases in 12 words

  What they said → what they really mean
    “Per my last email” · Blame-shift
      ↳ You ignored my last email.
    “No rush but” · Fake “no rush”
      ↳ Rush. Definitely rush.
    “please advise” · Veiled threat
      ↳ Do something. This is now your problem.

Two ways to use it

1. Before you send — paste your own draft and de-venom it. That “friendly reminder” lands harder than you think. Use --max-score to gate it in CI.
2. After you receive — paste the message that made your eye twitch and get the subtext spelled out (and a laugh).

Why

Workplace messages have a second language running under the first. The polite surface (“just following up!”) carries a payload (“you’ve been ignoring me”). This decodes that payload: it highlights the phrases, groups them by type of passive-aggression, and translates each one.

It’s a decoder, not a mind-reader. Tone is context — a “friendly reminder” from a friend is friendly; from the person whose deadline you blew, less so. Read the clichés here; read the room yourself.

Install

npm i -g is-this-passive-aggressive     # then:  is-this-passive-aggressive draft.txt
# or zero-install:
npx is-this-passive-aggressive draft.txt

Usage

is-this-passive-aggressive "paste the message right here"   # a string
is-this-passive-aggressive draft.txt                        # a file
pbpaste | is-this-passive-aggressive                         # the clipboard (macOS)
is-this-passive-aggressive draft.txt --md > report.md        # Markdown table
is-this-passive-aggressive draft.txt --json                  # machine-readable

passagg is a shorter alias for the same command.

Flags

| Flag | What it does | | --- | --- | | --md [file] | Markdown table (What they said → what they really mean) | | --json [file] | Full report as JSON | | --max-score <n> | Exit 1 if venom exceeds n — a CI gate for de-venoming your own drafts | | --ignore <category> | Skip a category (repeatable) | | --quiet | No pretty output (use with --max-score) | | --no-color | Disable ANSI colors |

Lint your own outbox

is-this-passive-aggressive drafts/reply-to-dana.txt --max-score 20 --quiet

The categories

| Category | Signals | | --- | --- | | Blame-shift | “per my last email”, “as I mentioned”, “as previously discussed” | | The nudge | “just following up”, “circling back”, “bumping this”, “any update?” | | Fake-polite | “with all due respect”, “friendly reminder”, “thanks in advance” | | Condescension | “to be clear”, “as you may already know”, “for future reference” | | Veiled threat | “please advise”, “going forward”, “I’m sure it’s just an oversight” | | Cover-your-ass | “looping in your manager”, “adding for visibility”, “for the record” | | Fake “no rush” | “no rush, but”, “at your earliest convenience”, “whenever you have a moment” | | Dismissive | “noted”, “it is what it is”, “sure, that’s fine”, “k” |

Library

The core is pure and browser-safe (no node:*), so you can use it anywhere:

import { analyze } from "is-this-passive-aggressive";

const report = analyze("Per my last email, please advise.");
report.verdict.score;   // 100
report.verdict.band;    // "venom"
report.topFlags[0];     // { match: "Per my last email", category: "blame-shift", decode: "You ignored my last email.", count: 1 }

How the score works

Each phrase carries a weight; venom is the accumulated weight, scaled and capped at 100. We deliberately don’t normalize by length — “per my last email” is just as cutting in a one-liner as in a wall of text — so the score stays predictable and we can always show exactly which phrases produced it.

| Score | Band | | | --- | --- | --- | | 0–19 | Reads sincere | ✅ | | 20–44 | A little passive-aggressive | 🙂 | | 45–69 | Quite passive-aggressive | 😤 | | 70–100 | Weapons-grade passive-aggressive | ☠️ |

Privacy

Everything runs locally. The CLI reads your text, scores it in memory, and prints the result. The web playground runs the exact same engine compiled to the browser — open the network tab, you’ll see nothing leave. No telemetry, no account, no upload. Ever. (Which matters a lot when the thing you’re pasting is the email you’re furious about.)

Contributing

The most useful contribution is a new phrase — the corporate-speak, the category it belongs to, and an honest, funny-but-true decode. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT © didrod205

A rule-based decoder, not a mind-reader. It reads the clichés — your judgment reads the room.