The AI-generated Markdown cleanup checklist (12 items)

1. Filler intros

The "Sure! Here's a draft of…" and "Of course - here's…" openers. Useful in a chat, dead weight in a document. Strip the first paragraph unless it contains substantive content.

2. Filler outros

"Let me know if you'd like me to…", "I hope this helps!", "Feel free to adjust." The last paragraph of an AI response is almost always conversational closing. Cut it.

3. Excessive horizontal rules

AI assistants insert --- separators liberally - between every section, between every example. In a document they read as visible junk. Keep them only where a strong section break genuinely helps; remove the rest.

4. Mixed bullet styles

A single list with *, - and • mixed across items. Normalize to one bullet character throughout the document. Picking - tends to play best with downstream parsers.

5. Smart quotes that shouldn't be smart

Curly quotes (“ ”) are fine in body prose; they're a disaster inside code samples, command-lines and JSON. Replace smart quotes inside code blocks with straight ASCII (" ") before you ship anything technical.

6. Em-dashes instead of hyphens

AI prose uses long em-dashes (—) as transition marks. That's fine. The mistake is when they appear in identifiers, slugs, file names or command-line examples, where they break tools. Audit anything that should be a hyphen.

7. Invisible Unicode characters

Zero-width spaces (U+200B), byte-order marks, soft hyphens. They don't render but they break grep, diffs, and copy-paste into terminals. Strip them.

8. Broken heading hierarchy

AI assistants start documents with ## instead of #, or skip from # to ###. Fix the hierarchy so each document has exactly one # H1 and no skipped levels. Outline-aware tools (Docs, Notion, Confluence) rely on this.

9. Unclosed code fences

A model that runs out of tokens mid-response leaves the closing ``` off. Pasting the source into another document turns subsequent paragraphs into one giant code block. Always check that fence counts are even.

10. Tables with ragged columns

Body rows that have a different number of cells than the header. See the table-repair article for the full treatment. The short version: count, pad or truncate, normalize the delimiter row.

11. Over-bolding

Some assistants bold every other phrase. In a document, that reads as emphasis on nothing in particular. Pick the two or three things that genuinely need to stand out and unbold the rest.

12. Trailing AI disclaimers

"As an AI…", "I don't have access to real-time data", "I can't verify…". These belong in chats, not in your finished deliverable. Search and remove on every document.

Run the checklist automatically

Each item on this list is mechanical. None of them require judgement once you've decided that the cleanup should happen at all. That's exactly the kind of work that should be automated: paste your Markdown into Markdown Tidy, hit Clean, and all twelve items are handled in one pass. You get the time back to do the work that actually requires you.

Related reading: 8 common ChatGPT formatting artifacts · Why ChatGPT Markdown breaks in Google Docs