deslopify

name	deslopify
description	Rewrite user-facing copy (marketing pages, docs, headings, UI microcopy, READMEs, PR descriptions) to strip AI-slop and salesy tone, leaving plain, understated, factual prose. Use when asked to "deslopify", "deslop", "remove the AI slop", "make this less salesy/less AI-sounding", "make the copy plainer", or when reviewing copy for slop tells.

Deslopify

Turn copy that reads as AI-generated or salesy into plain, understated, factual prose. Preserve meaning, voice, and technical accuracy. Cut the tells, don't flatten everything into mush.

Slop isn't only word choice. It's also presentation: a colorized highlight on one word in every heading reads as generated even when the words are good. Watch the markup, not just the prose.

Audience note: developers and technical readers are especially allergic to slop. For API docs, CLIs, and engineering content, lean terse and literal.

When to use

Any user-facing text: landing pages, section copy, headings, button/label microcopy, docs, READMEs, changelogs, PR/release descriptions, notification strings. Not for code identifiers, log lines, or internal comments.

The tells (hunt and remove)

1. Em-dashes (—). The single biggest tell. Restructure with a period, comma, colon, or parentheses. Applies to dialogue and examples too (people don't type em-dashes in chat). After editing, grep to be sure: grep -rn '—' <files>.
2. "Thing. Why-thing." headers — two-sentence headlines like "Open source. Your knowledge stays yours." Use one plain declarative line.
3. "X, not Y" constructions — "A memo, not a transcript.", "the process, not just the artifact." Drop the rhetorical contrast; state the thing. (Plainly factual "returns 404, not 403" in technical prose is fine if it's describing behavior, not scoring a point — judge by whether it's a flourish.)
4. Triples / parallelism — "Your data. Your agent. Yours to take.", "We don't train it. We don't sell it. We don't borrow it." Keep one clause; a literal list of items (a, b, and c) is fine.
5. Cutesy / self-aware headlines — "Things worth actually doing.", "Every endpoint, all 26.", "The one most people are here for." Name the thing plainly.
6. Clichés and filler — "that's the whole point", "the whole point of X", "on the radar", "black hole", "light up", "no vendor lock", "say so", "out of the box", "under the hood", "first-class", "seamless", "effortless", "powerful", "robust", "leverage", "unlock", "elevate", "supercharge", "delight", "magic", "buttery", "blazingly fast", "we've got you covered", "and more".
7. Hype adjectives / adverbs — "incredibly", "actually", "simply", "just" (as filler), "truly", "genuinely" (when padding), "extremely". Delete or replace with something concrete.
8. Naming competitors — even when one motivated the product. Describe the gap, not the rival.
9. Aspirational claims stated as present fact — see the honesty rule below.
10. Throat-clearing openers — "Here's the thing:", "Here's what X does", "It turns out", "The truth is", "What you need to know:". Filler before the point. Delete it and open on the point itself.
11. Self-posed rhetorical questions — "Want faster builds?", "The result? Faster builds." Question-then-answer is a setup, not information. State the thing. A genuine question to the reader is fine; the manufactured one isn't.
12. The "serves as" dodge — "serves as", "stands as", "acts as", "represents"/"marks" when they just mean is. Use "is", or better, say what the thing does. ("This endpoint serves as the entry point" → "Start here.")
13. False agency — inanimate subjects doing human things to dodge the actor: "errors surface themselves", "the config decides", "the data tells us". Name who or what acts (the worker, the user, the query). Deliberate personification as voice is fine; the tell is the reflexive dodge.
14. Listicle in prose — "The first… The second… The third…": a list wearing a sentence costume. Weave the points into real prose, or make it a real list. A genuine enumerated list is fine.
15. Vague attributions — "experts agree", "studies show", "it's widely known", "many teams". No nameable source means no source: cut the claim or name it.
16. Invented concept labels — christening a plain idea to sound deep: "the calibration paradox", "the X effect", a quoted neologism. Describe the mechanic instead of naming it.
17. Bold-first bullets — every bullet led by a **bolded phrase** — then a gloss. One or two for genuine emphasis is fine; a whole list of them is a template tell. Like the accent spans it's markup, so hunt it (grep -rn '^[[:space:]]*[-*] \*\*' <files>), not the prose.
18. Formulaic colorized highlights — one accent-colored word in every heading (and pull-quote), e.g. <span class="accent">…</span> on a word per <h2>. It reads as generated even when the words are fine, because the placement is mechanical: every heading, always one phrase. Reserve the accent for rare, deliberate emphasis (the page's primary headline, or hero + closing CTA as bookends) and let body headings stand in plain ink. The brand color still carries the page through eyebrows, labels, links, card edges, and rules, so trimming heading highlights doesn't drain the color, it just stops the tell. This is a visual tell, not a word choice: hunt the markup (grep -rn 'class="accent"'), not the prose.

Rewrite principles

• Plain and understated beats polished and salesy. Short declaratives. Say what it is and what it does.
• Preserve the author's voice and any first-person framing. Deslop ≠ rewrite in your voice. Keep their cadence, just remove the tells.
• Be conservative. Change a sentence only if it carries a tell or reads as marketing. Don't rephrase clean copy for its own sake.
• Never add claims. Don't invent benefits, features, or numbers to fill the hole a cut cliché left. If a line only had hype, it can often just go.
• Stay honest. Describe the real, current mechanic — not aspirations dressed as fact. If copy claims something the product doesn't do yet, flag it rather than smoothing it over. (This is a hard rule for sales/marketing surfaces.)
• Keep technical accuracy. Don't change endpoint names, types, numbers, or behavior while editing prose around them.

Process

1. Locate the copy in scope. A file, a selection, a section, or "the whole page". For multi-file sweeps, list the files first.
2. Scan for each tell above. Read for tone, not just keywords — slop is often structural (cadence, contrast, triples), not a single word.
3. Rewrite in place, one tell at a time, keeping voice and accuracy.
4. Re-scan mechanically. At minimum grep -rn '—' <files> for stray em-dashes; grep -rn 'class="accent"' <files> for highlight tells and grep -rn '^[[:space:]]*[-*] \*\*' <files> for bold-first bullets; spot-check the cliché list and openers ("Here's", "It turns out"). Em-dashes hide in page <title>s and alt text too.
5. Report what changed: the notable before→after rewrites and anything you flagged as a possibly-false claim rather than edited.

Examples

• Build on the same workspace Threa reads. → Threa's public API.
• Things worth actually doing. → Worked examples.
• Every endpoint, all 26. → API reference.
• It opens a prefilled issue — no black hole. → It opens a prefilled issue on the public repo for you to review and submit.
• The stack we deploy is the stack you run. Nothing held back. → Fork it and run your own build. It's the same code we ship.
• messages and memos are sealed end-to-end (rolling out now) → (also a factual fix) turn on end-to-end encryption for sensitive conversations; those hold ciphertext and produce no memos.
• Six headings each with <span class="accent">one word</span> → accent only the hero and the closing CTA; the rest plain. (Trim the highlight, keep the words.)
• Here's the thing: setup is one command. → Setup is one command.
• This service serves as the entry point for auth. → Authenticate here.
• Want faster builds? Here's how. → (cut the question; lead with the steps.)
• The first benefit is speed; the second is caching. → It's faster, and it caches results between runs.

Guardrails

• Don't touch code blocks, identifiers, or config except to fix prose around them.
• Don't strip meaning to hit a "plainer" target; a clear two-clause sentence beats a terse but vague one.
• When the only honest fix is structural (the claim is wrong, not just sloppy), say so and propose the corrected claim rather than quietly rewording.

Credits

Part of the tell catalog cross-pollinated from Stephen Turner's skill-deslop (github.com/stephenturner/skill-deslop, MIT) and tropes.fyi.