Alex—the script's fittingly androgynous name—will alert you if any input text contains offensive phrasing, and suggests neutral alternatives. For example, an input of "businesswoman" suggests "entrepreneur" or "business executive" as viable options instead.

As the script's developer Titus Wormer told me, the idea was actually suggested to him by another coder, who was inspired in turn by this tweet from a programmer of color.

While it was designed with programming in mind, the tool will work with any text.

"I'm deeply interested in natural language, and am an avid open source contributor," Wormer said. "For the last two years I've worked on getting computers to 'understand' human language." He's written a script called Franc that detects more languages than Google Translate, and one called Retext that aims to make normal syntax processable for computers.