deslop

deslop is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools. It costs 70 tokens per session (1,830 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of deslop, MIT.

A writing editor that removes predictable AI-style wording while preserving the author's meaning, facts, citations, uncertainty, and voice.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it on papers, articles, reports, newsletters, cover letters, or other substantial writing that needs a more human tone.
Why use it?
It makes prose sound more natural without quietly changing claims or inventing evidence.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the understudy plugin — 43 skills, 1 command shipped together

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/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools/deslop
Any agent
npx skills add understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools --skill deslop
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install understudy, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 43 skills, 1 command.

Per session 70 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,830 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 92% 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 $0.00070 $0.01830
Opus 5 $0.00035 $0.00915
Sonnet 5 $0.00014 $0.00366
Haiku 4.5 $0.00007 $0.00183

Measured 3d ago against content hash e575c03cb1c4, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

deslop 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 3d 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

92% identical to deslop — 18 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.

skills/deslop/SKILL.md · 144 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 144 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Deslop: Remove AI Writing Patterns from Prose

Strip predictable AI patterns from writing. Make prose sound like a specific human wrote it, not like a language model generated it.

Safety Gates

Preserve the author's meaning, factual claims, citations, uncertainty, and voice. Do not invent sources, evidence, quotations, or personal experiences to make prose feel human. Flag a claim that needs verification instead of quietly strengthening, weakening, or deleting it.

When to Apply

  • Any request to "make it sound human" or "deslop" writing
  • Any prose (articles, blog posts, essays, memos, newsletters, reports) or scientific writing (manuscripts, abstracts, cover letters, grant narratives, discussion sections, peer review responses) where the user wants it to sound natural rather than AI-generated
  • Editing or revising existing text where the user wants it to sound natural rather than AI-generated
  • Reviewing text for AI tells

Core Rules

1. Cut filler phrases

Remove throat-clearing openers ("Here's the thing:"), emphasis crutches ("Let that sink in."), business jargon ("navigate the landscape"), and meta-commentary ("In this section, we'll explore..."). See references/phrases.md for the full catalog.

2. Break formulaic structures

Avoid binary contrasts ("Not X. Y."), negative listings ("Not a X. Not a Y. A Z."), dramatic fragmentation ("Speed. That's it. That's the tradeoff."), self-posed rhetorical questions ("The result? Devastating."), and anaphora/tricolon abuse. See references/structures.md for patterns and fixes.

3. Eliminate AI tropes

Watch for the full catalog of AI writing tells: "quietly" and other magic adverbs, "delve" and its cousins, the "serves as" dodge, false ranges ("from X to Y" where the range is meaningless), superficial participle analyses ("highlighting its importance"), invented concept labels ("the supervision paradox"), grandiose stakes inflation, patronizing analogies, and false vulnerability. See references/tropes.md for the complete list with examples.

Read the full file on GitHub · 144 lines

Files

What ships with it

5 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 3d ago First seen · 144 lines · 70 tokens per session scan A e575c03cb1c4

Subscribe to this mod's changes

deslop is a skill published in the GitHub repository understudylabs/understudy-agent-tools (16 stars, last pushed 4d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 70 tokens to every session and 1,830 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 92% identical to deslop, differing in 18 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

systematic-debugging

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.

obra/superpowers · 21 tokens

brainstorming

You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.

obra/superpowers · 37 tokens

auto-perf-optimize

Run agent-driven VS Code performance or memory investigations. Use when asked to launch Code OSS, automate a VS Code scenario, run the Chat memory smoke runner, capture renderer heap snapshots, take workflow screenshots, compare run summaries, or drive a repeatable scenario before heap-snapshot analysis.

microsoft/vscode · 62 tokens

chat-perf

Run chat perf benchmarks and memory leak checks against the local dev build or any published VS Code version. Use when investigating chat rendering regressions, validating perf-sensitive changes to chat UI, or checking for memory leaks in the chat response pipeline.

microsoft/vscode · 51 tokens

chat-pet-sprite-creation

Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.

microsoft/vscode · 53 tokens

cpu-profile-analysis

Analyze V8/Chrome CPU profiles (.cpuprofile) and DevTools trace files (Trace-.json). Use when: profiling performance, investigating slow functions, comparing code paths, finding bottlenecks, analyzing timeToRequest, understanding call trees from sampling profiler data, analyzing layout/paint/rendering, investigating…

microsoft/vscode · 71 tokens