# Cataphoric forecasting Part of [The AI Tells Index](https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells). A tell signals low effort. It does not identify an author. Skilled writers produce every shape listed here, some of them daily, and automated detectors misread those writers for it at rates measured above 60 percent on non-native English prose. Nothing in this index proves that a machine wrote anything. Read an entry as one piece of evidence to weigh against the false-positive notes printed beside it. ## Facts - Id: cataphoric-forecasting - Category: Structural and syntactic (structural) - Subcategory: signposting - Also known as: three things stand out, numbered lead-in, announced count - Status: Active. Currently signals low-effort writing. - Severity: low - Evidence grade: community-observed (named by practitioners, no formal measurement exists) - Languages: en - Added: 2026-08-15 - Updated: 2026-08-17 - Page: https://feedsquad.com/ai-tells/cataphoric-forecasting ## Description The text announces how many points are coming before it makes any of them. vale-ai-tells implements the numbered lead-in as a rule with thirteen surface forms, and tropes.fyi carries the analogue. The count is usually accurate and almost always unnecessary, because on a page the items are about to appear where the reader can see them. ## Why it reads as machine-written Announcing a count buys nothing in writing. A reader can see how many items follow. In speech the move does real work, because a listener cannot scroll back, and it reaches text through material that was spoken first or written to sound spoken. Severity stays low for exactly that reason: the habit is ordinary, and it only reads as low effort when the list is already visible below it. ## Detection Type: deterministic (a regular expression, run as written) Scope: sentence ECMAScript regular expression. The build validator compiles it and tests it against this entry's own specimens. ```regex \b(?:(?:There|Here|Below) are (?:the )?(?:two|three|four|five|six|seven) (?:\w+ ){0,2}(?:reasons|ways|things|factors|points|steps|lessons|takeaways|pillars|principles)|(?:Two|Three|Four|Five|Six|Seven) (?:\w+ ){0,2}(?:things|factors|reasons|forces|patterns) (?:stand out|matter here|explain|drive this|define))\b ``` Flags: gi ## Examples Constructed specimens. Written for this index. Never quoted from anyone's posts. ### Specimen 1 Before, exhibiting the tell: > There are three key reasons the migration slipped, and each one deserves its own paragraph. The first comes down to planning, or rather the lack of it. The second is about communication between the teams involved. The third is the one nobody wants to talk about, and it is probably the most important of them. After, repaired: > The migration slipped twice. The vendor export endpoint rate-limited at 200 rows a minute, and the staging disk filled on 3 March while nobody was watching it. Note: The count is announced, the three items arrive, and all three are empty. The repair drops the announcement and names the two causes. Figures in this repair are invented for the specimen. ## False positives Who legitimately writes this way. Presentation trainers teach this move as the standard way to open a section, and preachers, lecturers and anyone speaking to a room that cannot scroll back use it because a listener needs the count in advance. Conference abstracts and structured reports announce their own contributions by convention. Treat a hit in a transcript, a talk script or a slide deck as expected noise. On a page where the list is already visible below the sentence, the count is doing no work at all. ## Model attribution Undocumented by vendor. The pattern is heavy in chat-surface output, where a reply cannot rely on the reader seeing the whole answer at once, and it survives into pasted text that no longer has that problem. ## Sources 1. vale-ai-tells, 111 machine-checkable rules https://github.com/tbhb/vale-ai-tells (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) 2. tropes.fyi pattern directory https://tropes.fyi/directory (tier: community; accessed 2026-08-14) ## Status history Ids are permanent. A retired tell keeps its id and its page. - 2026-08-15, Active: Implemented as a live rule in one community rule set and listed in another, with no report of the habit fading. Severity is low because the move is ordinary in speech and in anything transcribed from it. ## License CC BY 4.0. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Attribution: The AI Tells Index, feedsquad.com/ai-tells Reuse the data, including commercially. Keep the attribution line. --- Dataset version 1.0.0. Schema version 1. Part of [FeedSquad](https://feedsquad.com). Built by [Herman Foundry](https://hermanfoundry.com) from Levi, Finnish Lapland.