Jasper Galton-Fenzi
The Sniff Test
What it does
You paste in a message, an email, an advert or a sales pitch, and The Sniff Test highlights the pressure tactics in it: false urgency, too-good-to-be-true offers, requests for upfront payment and similar.
How it works
- Plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript, with no framework and no backend.
- The checks are pattern-matching rules (regular expressions), each one tied to a named tactic, so the result explains why something was flagged.
- Everything runs in your browser, so nothing you paste is sent anywhere. That matters for a tool people might use on private messages.
- Hosted for free on GitHub Pages, MIT licence.
Why I built it
I was pitched an expensive online "AI agency" coaching programme and had to dig through reviews to see the pressure tactics for what they were. The Sniff Test does that first check for you. It's also the first project I built from scratch and finished (v1.1).
What's next
I'm deciding whether a v2 should use a language model instead of fixed rules. It would catch more, but it couldn't stay fully in the browser for free.