slop-cop

README

Never ship 'delve' again. slop-cop reads your agent's prose with 48 detectors and returns a JSON rap sheet the agent revises against, in CI, pre-commit, or inline.

Get started

brew install yasyf/tap/slop-cop
slop-cop check draft.md --pretty

Driving with an agent? Paste this:

/plugin marketplace add yasyf/slop-cop
/plugin install slop-cop@slop-cop

No plugin support? Paste this instead.

Install slop-cop with `brew install yasyf/tap/slop-cop`. Then run
`slop-cop check README.md --pretty` and revise the file until the
violations array is empty.

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Use cases

Make your agent self-edit before you ever see the draft

You ask for a PR description and get "In today's fast-paced world" back — then you spend the review playing copy editor. Install the plugin and its skill runs this loop on every draft, before the agent replies:

printf '%s' "$draft" | slop-cop check --lang=markdown -

The agent walks the violations array, rewrites each matchedText, and re-checks until counts_by_rule is {}. You see the clean revision, never the slop.

Block era-openers and hedge stacks in CI and pre-commit

Slop merges because nobody wants to be the reviewer who flags tone. Make the machine do it:

slop-cop check docs/announcement.md | jq -e '.violations == []'

check always exits 0 and puts the verdict in the JSON; jq -e turns the empty violations array into the pass/fail bit. The 35 client-side detectors make no network calls, so the gate costs milliseconds.

Lint only the prose hiding in JSDoc, JSX, and string literals

Your linter has opinions about semicolons and none about the "seamless synergy" in your hero copy:

slop-cop check src/Hero.tsx

tree-sitter masks every non-prose byte before detectors run, so hits land only on comments, string literals, and JSX text — an "In an era of" JSDoc opener and a negation-pivot inside a string literal both get flagged, with offsets that index the original file.

Commands

Command	What it does
check [path|-]	Run detectors; emit a JSON violation report.
rewrite [path|-]	Rewrite a paragraph via claude -p, optionally targeting --rules.
rules	Print the rule catalogue as JSON (--category, --llm-only).
version	Print build metadata as JSON.

Input is the positional argument (- or omitted for stdin). Run slop-cop check --help for the full flag list, or slop-cop rules --pretty for the taxonomy of all 48 rules. Exit codes: 0 success, 2 input/IO error, 3 claude subprocess error, 4 usage error.

How it works

Built for agents, not humans: no TUI, no highlighting, no prompts — JSON on stdout, diagnostics on stderr. check runs 35 instant client-side detectors (regex + structural), then optionally two Claude-backed tiers: sentence (Haiku, 10 more rules) under --llm and document (Sonnet, 3 more) under --llm-deep — 48 rules total. --llm-effort (off|low|high|auto) is the underlying control; under a plugin with claude reachable, auto resolves to high, and an unreachable claude fails open — the error lands in the report's llm field while client-side results still return. The LLM tiers and rewrite shell out to the claude CLI, so slop-cop never needs an Anthropic API key; it rides your Claude subscription.

--lang (auto by extension, or force text, markdown, html, jsx, tsx, ts, js) parses the input and masks non-prose bytes before detectors run. Masking preserves length and newline offsets, so violation offsets index the original input. Add --lines 50:80 to report only violations beginning in an edited range while still scanning the whole document for context.

[!WARNING] startIndex / endIndex are UTF-8 byte offsets, not UTF-16 code units — account for that when slicing in JavaScript or Java.

The agent plugin

The slop-cop-prose skill triggers whenever you ask the agent to write, revise, or polish prose, and keeps the loop silent: the agent never announces it. A /slop-cop-check command runs a one-off report without rewriting anything.

Claude Code

Install with the two /plugin commands under Get started. On the first draft, the skill runs scripts/install-binary.sh (.ps1 on Windows) to download the prebuilt binary for your platform from the rolling latest release; no Go toolchain required. Verify end-to-end with scripts/test-plugin.sh.

Cursor

Open the Plugins panel and install from Git URL https://github.com/yasyf/slop-cop. The same skill and first-run bootstrap apply, keyed off $CURSOR_PLUGIN_ROOT.

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The Go source is licensed under MIT. The rule taxonomy, detectors, word lists, and prompts derive from awnist/slop-cop by @awnist, which carried no licence at port time — see NOTICE before use beyond personal. Original rule sources: LLM_PROSE_TELLS.md (MIT, © sneak), Wikipedia: Signs of AI writing (CC BY-SA 4.0), tropes.md.