antislop

A portable spec of "AI slop": the writing patterns that make text read as machine-generated, and the rules for removing them. Point an AI agent at this repo and it has what it needs to strip slop from prose while keeping the meaning.

Slop is not bad grammar. It is the set of stylistic tics that large language models over-produce because those tics were rewarded during training: em dashes, "it's not X, it's Y", the rule of three, the bolded one-line mic-drop, the reflective closing sentence, and the habit of announcing its own honesty. Each one is fine once. As a reflex, across every paragraph, they are the tell.

Use it with an agent

Point your coding or writing agent at this repo (clone it, add it to context, or drop it in a project). The agent should read AGENTS.md, apply the catalogue in PATTERNS.md, and follow the method in PROCESS.md.

A one-line brief that works:

Read AGENTS.md and PATTERNS.md in the antislop repo, then deslop these files. Preserve meaning. Run python check_slop.py afterwards and fix what it flags.

Use it in CI

check_slop.py is a dependency-free checker. It fails the build on em/en dashes (the highest-signal tell) and reports the phrase-level tics it finds:

python check_slop.py path/to/docs   # scans .md/.txt/.html/.rst under the paths

Exit code is non-zero if any dash codepoint is found, so it drops into a lint job as a gate.

Contents

• AGENTS.md: the operative instructions an agent follows.
• PATTERNS.md: the catalogue. Each pattern, why it reads as slop, and a sloppy-to-clean example.
• PROCESS.md: how to deslop reliably, and why a separate editing pass beats trying to write clean in one go.
• check_slop.py: the deterministic checker.
• examples/: before-and-after rewrites.

Scope

This targets style, not substance. It does not check facts, grammar, or correctness, and it will not improve a weak argument. Keep the author's meaning, domain terms, and spelling convention (UK or US). The goal is plain, concrete, specific prose, not prose flattened into something robotic.