anti-slop

anti-slop

Slop is not a vocabulary problem. It is manufactured upstream: alignment training collapses output toward the statistical mean (mode collapse, driven by typicality bias in preference data — arXiv 2510.01171), single-sample generation returns the most typical completion, and a context starved of specifics can only produce the average of everything. Banned-word lists treat the symptom. At adoption scale they mint a new house style — the zero-em-dash, no-adverbs voice is already its own tell, and Wikipedia's own tells-catalog maintainers warn that scrubbing signs "could just make detection harder."

The job: make the output sound like a specific person with something specific to say. Both halves are mandatory. This skill intervenes at four layers and measures whether it worked. It is a writing-quality protocol, not a detector-evasion tool.

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Modes

Mode	When	Run
DRAFT	writing new text	Layers 1→2→3→4, ship with score
AUDIT	handed existing text	Layers 3→4, report score before/after + fix list

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The contract — verify before generating anything

Two inputs separate writing from slop. Check both first:

1. A bound voice. In priority order:

• an explicit voice spec (voice file, brand guide), or
• 5+ writing samples from the author → build a voice card on the fly (references/voice-binding.md), or
• a named register the user states ("tired senior engineer in Slack", "group-chat shitposter who knows finance").

If none exists: STOP and say so. Offer the choice: "Give me 5+ samples or name a register — otherwise I can deliver clean-generic, which reads fine but sounds like no one." NEVER silently fall back to a default voice. A default voice shipped by every agent is the next generation of slop.

2. Specifics. At least 3 concrete particulars the text can stand on: a number, a name, a date, a moment, a place, a mechanism, a contradiction, a thing that broke. No specifics in context → get them (ask the user, or pull from the material available to you). Never invent particulars to fill the gap. If neither is possible, say: "No specifics available — anything I write will be generic by construction." That sentence is more useful than the slop would have been.