Deslop

Deslop

Slop is the absence of a decision — the statistically likeliest filler standing where a choice should have been made. That is the test for every finding: was this chosen? The same construction, picked deliberately in the author's voice, is not slop. The goal is never "clean" text; it is text where every word survived a decision.

Two facts shape the method:

1. You cannot see your own slop. Slop patterns are artifacts of preference tuning, not vocabulary mistakes — the model that produces them rates them as good writing on re-read. Verification is therefore mechanical (re-scan with the checks in references/checks.md), never impressionistic.
2. Overcorrection is also slop. Scrubbed-flat prose, fake typos, forced slang, and mechanical long/short sentence alternation are their own recognizable genre. Voice is protected before anything is subtracted.

Modes

Mode	Trigger	What happens
Edit (default)	text to deslop/humanize	Full process below; rewrite delivered with a short change note
Detect	"is this AI?", "find the tells"	Name patterns, quote the lines. Never output an "AI likelihood" score — named patterns are evidence, detectors are guesses. Do not edit.
Code	a diff or "deslop this code"	Code checklist below, diff-scoped
UI	pages, components, styling	Route to the hallmark skill — do not improvise UI rules here

Principles

1. Protect voice first. Before editing, list 3–5 voice signals to preserve (vocabulary level, cadence, bluntness, humor, uncertainty style, digressions, punctuation habits). A user-supplied writing sample overrides every default in this skill, including the dash budget. See references/voice.md.
2. Delete first, rewrite second. Most slop guards nothing — cut it. Rewrite only what carries meaning. Cap total deletion at ~25% of the piece; past that you are gutting content, not removing slop.
3. Rewrite by meaning, never by paraphrasing the pattern. Ask what the sentence is for, then say that plainly. A paraphrase that preserves the move ("the real X is Y" for "not X but Y") is a new finding, not a fix — the banned escape hatches are listed in references/structures.md.
4. Fake-profound lines are deleted, not re-metaphored. Replacing one purple kicker with a better metaphor reproduces the disease.
5. Never invent facts. Specificity comes from the source or from the author. Where a concrete detail is missing, leave [ADD: which study? what year?] — never a plausible-sounding fill. Before delivering, answer explicitly: does the rewrite state any fact, name, number, date, or citation not present in the source?
6. One strong finding beats three weak ones. Bold + scare quotes + a dash aside on the same phrase is one stacked tell, not three. Consolidate before reporting.
7. Every rule carries its exemption. House-style Title Case, genuine tricolons, term-definition bullets in docs, a single "however" — the exemption columns in the reference files are as binding as the rules.
8. Match the register. Reddit, academic, docs, and marketing have different fatal tells and different legitimate structures — check the register guide in references/voice.md before flagging.

Process (Edit mode)

1. Read whole, capture voice. Read the full piece once. Note register + audience. Write down the 3–5 protected voice signals.
2. Scan. Sweep against references/patterns.md (surface tells), references/structures.md (structural moves), and the mechanical checks in references/checks.md. Collect findings with quotes.
3. Triage. Apply exemptions; consolidate stacked tells; drop anything that is a defensible authorial choice or a protected voice signal.
4. Rewrite. Delete-first. Per finding: what is this sentence for? Say that, in the author's voice. No escape-hatch paraphrases.
5. Verify mechanically. Re-run the scan against your own output. Any hit is a new finding. Loop at most 3 passes; if a passage still fires, rewrite it from the bare claim in plain declarative sentences.
6. Fact check. Answer the invented-facts question from Principle 5.
7. Deliver. Final text plus a change note of at most 8 lines, grouped by pattern. If the note needs more than 8 lines, you changed too much — reconsider.

Quick checks (30 seconds, before delivering)

• Any em/en dash? Budget: 0 in short copy, ≤2 in a long piece — and no swapping them for parentheses; restructure the sentence. (Voice sample overrides.)
• Any "not X but Y" — or any of its escape-hatch paraphrases?
• Any inanimate noun performing a human action ("the data tells us")?
• Three items where two would do? Three sentences of the same length in a row?
• Any sentence that sounds like a pull-quote? Delete it.
• Opener that clears its throat ("Here's the thing")? Ending that recaps or reassures?
• Any bold mid-prose, emoji in headings, **Label:** restatement bullets?
• Any fact, number, or name the source doesn't contain?
• Would the author actually say this sentence out loud?

Code mode

Scope: the diff (git diff main or this session's changes), not the whole repo. Keep behavior unchanged; minimal focused edits; match the file's existing style. Remove:

• Comments a human wouldn't write — narrating the obvious, explaining the change to a reviewer ("// added to handle the new case"), restating the next line. Keep only comments stating what the code cannot: constraints, whys, workarounds.
• Defensive bloat — try/catch, null checks, and validation abnormal for that area, especially on trusted/already-validated codepaths; generic except Exception / empty catch blocks.
• Type evasion — any casts and assertions used to silence the checker instead of fixing the type.
• Placeholder naming — data, result, temp, handleData, Manager/Helper suffixes carrying no specificity.
• Ceremony — zero-information docstrings, single-use wrapper layers, speculative abstraction, dead code, debug leftovers, README boilerplate ("This project aims to..."), emoji in code or docs.
• Any other style inconsistent with the file.

Run the tests after. Report in 1–3 sentences.

Credits

Merged and reworked from: blader/humanizer (Siqi Chen; the Wikipedia "Signs of AI writing" lineage — also the root of the Zed, Hermes, jpeggdev, softaworks, and humanizer-zh forks), hardikpandya/stop-slop, juliusbrussee fuck-slop, petergyang/no-ai-slop, jpeggdev/humanize-writing, realrossmanngroup/no_ai_slop_writing_rules, nousresearch/hermes-agent humanizer, worldwonderer/oh-story-claudecode story-deslop, cursor/plugins deslop, and brianlovin/agent-config deslop. All doctrine belongs to its authors; this is a transformative merge with attribution.