StopSlop: The Bullshit Detector AI Content Needs

I write about AI tools for a living, which means I read a lot of AI-generated text. The tell isn't grammar — it's vocabulary. "Delve." "Unlock." "Game-changer." "Tapestry." These words appear so often in LLM output that they've become the literary equivalent of a fake ID that says "McLovin."

StopSlop is a skill file that catches these tells. Drop it into Claude Code or any AI coding agent and it flags 100+ AI-ism patterns before you publish. I use it on every article for this site, and it catches things my eye skips over after the third edit pass.

What it catches well: the obvious clichés (delve, pivotal, landscape, tapestry, testament, showcase), the signposting tics ("let's dive in," "in this article we'll explore"), and the hollow booster words (cutting-edge, unparalleled, robust, seamless). These account for maybe 70% of AI slop in my experience.

What it misses: the subtler patterns. AI writing tends toward a specific rhythm — short declarative sentence, then a colon, then a list. Or "X isn't just Y — it's Z." StopSlop doesn't catch structural tics, only vocabulary. It also produces false positives — words like "crucial" and "notably" appear in perfectly good human writing, and StopSlop doesn't distinguish context.

At 8,100+ GitHub stars, the community is actively contributing new patterns. The skill file format means you can add your own rules — I added "in the era of AI" and "as AI transforms" which catch a lot of slop the base file misses.

Who Should Use StopSlop

If you publish AI-assisted content and care about not sounding like every other AI-generated article, StopSlop is worth the 30 seconds it takes to add to your agent. It's not a replacement for human editing, but it's a fast first pass that catches the most embarrassing tells.

Who Should Skip

If you're already running a de-AI pipeline with custom rules (like the 7-gate check I use on this site), StopSlop is redundant. It's pattern-matching, not NLP — it won't catch AI structure, only AI vocabulary.

Bottom Line

StopSlop is a single-purpose tool that does its one job well. It won't make AI writing sound human, but it will catch the 100 most common tells that make AI writing sound like AI writing. For 8,100 stars and zero dollars, that's a good deal.