deslop

Skill: deslop

When to Use

Run this skill before every commit on AI-generated code. AI tends to:

• Add excessive comments explaining obvious things
• Create unnecessary abstractions "for future extensibility"
• Write verbose variable names that add noise
• Add defensive checks for impossible scenarios
• Generate boilerplate that wasn't asked for

This skill catches and removes that slop before it becomes technical debt.

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What "Slop" Looks Like

Category 1 — Obvious Comments

# BAD: comment restates the code
# Increment the counter by one
counter += 1

# BAD: docstring for a trivial getter
def get_name(self):
    """Returns the name."""  # ← remove this
    return self.name

# GOOD: comment explains the WHY, not the WHAT
# Retry once on 429 — Ollama rate limits burst requests
if response.status == 429:
    await asyncio.sleep(1)
    response = await client.post(...)

Category 2 — Phantom Abstractions

# BAD: helper function used exactly once
def _build_auth_header(token: str) -> dict:
    return {"Authorization": f"Bearer {token}"}

# ... used only here:
headers = _build_auth_header(api_key)

# GOOD: inline it — one use doesn't need extraction
headers = {"Authorization": f"Bearer {api_key}"}

Category 3 — Defensive Checks for Impossible Cases

# BAD: model is typed as str, can't be None here
if model is None:
    model = "default"

# BAD: list was just created, can't be empty by contract
if not items:
    return []

Category 4 — Speculative Generality

# BAD: added for hypothetical future use
class BaseRouter(ABC):
    @abstractmethod
    def route(self): ...

class ModelRouter(BaseRouter):
    def route(self): ...   # only one implementation, ever

# GOOD: just write ModelRouter directly
class ModelRouter:
    def route(self): ...

Category 5 — Verbose Variable Names

# BAD
current_request_model_name_string = request.model

# GOOD
model = request.model

Category 6 — Unasked-For Boilerplate