stop-slop

A prose-editing guide for removing common artificial-sounding writing habits.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when drafting, editing, or reviewing prose to cut filler, vague claims, passive voice, repetitive structures, and predictable AI phrasing.
Why use it?
It helps you make text more direct, specific, active, and natural to read.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/atanu80/stopslopskill/stopslopskill
Any agent
npx skills add atanu80/Stopslopskill --skill stopslopskill
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/atanu80/Stopslopskill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 26 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 615 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00026 $0.00615
Opus 5 $0.00013 $0.00308
Sonnet 5 $0.00005 $0.00123
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00061

Measured 2d ago against content hash 7432a1d9ebdd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

stop-slop scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to stop-slop — 0 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

SKILL.md · 69 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 69 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Stop Slop

Eliminate predictable AI writing patterns from prose.

Core Rules

  1. Cut filler phrases. Remove throat-clearing openers, emphasis crutches, and all adverbs. See references/phrases.md.

  2. Break formulaic structures. Avoid binary contrasts, negative listings, dramatic fragmentation, rhetorical setups, false agency. See references/structures.md.

  3. Use active voice. Every sentence needs a human subject doing something. No passive constructions. No inanimate objects performing human actions ("the complaint becomes a fix").

  4. Be specific. No vague declaratives ("The reasons are structural"). Name the specific thing. No lazy extremes ("every," "always," "never") doing vague work.

  5. Put the reader in the room. No narrator-from-a-distance voice. "You" beats "People." Specifics beat abstractions.

  6. Vary rhythm. Mix sentence lengths. Two items beat three. End paragraphs differently. No em dashes.

  7. Trust readers. State facts directly. Skip softening, justification, hand-holding.

  8. Cut quotables. If it sounds like a pull-quote, rewrite it.

Quick Checks

Before delivering prose:

  • Any adverbs? Kill them.
  • Any passive voice? Find the actor, make them the subject.
  • Inanimate thing doing a human verb ("the decision emerges")? Name the person.
  • Sentence starts with a Wh- word? Restructure it.
  • Any "here's what/this/that" throat-clearing? Cut to the point.
  • Any "not X, it's Y" contrasts? State Y directly.
  • Three consecutive sentences match length? Break one.
  • Paragraph ends with punchy one-liner? Vary it.
  • Em-dash anywhere? Remove it.
  • Vague declarative ("The implications are significant")? Name the specific implication.
  • Narrator-from-a-distance ("Nobody designed this")? Put the reader in the scene.
  • Meta-joiners ("The rest of this essay...")? Delete. Let the essay move.

Scoring

Rate 1-10 on each dimension:

Dimension Question
Directness Statements or announcements?
Rhythm Varied or metronomic?
Trust Respects reader intelligence?
Authenticity Sounds human?
Density Anything cuttable?

Read the full file on GitHub · 69 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 69 lines · 26 tokens per session scan A 7432a1d9ebdd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

stop-slop is a skill published in the GitHub repository atanu80/Stopslopskill (2 stars, last pushed 3mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 26 tokens to every session and 615 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to stop-slop, differing in 0 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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