Imported from holoviz-dev/holoviz-skills (contributing-to-holoviz/skills/deslop/SKILL.md). Install upstream with npx skills add holoviz-dev/holoviz-skills --skill deslop. Copyright stays with the author.

Deslop

Remove the recognisable machinery of LLM prose from a piece of writing without changing what it says.

Two failure modes to avoid, in order of severity:

1. Changing the meaning. The point is to delete the performance, not the content. If a slop pattern is wrapped around a real claim, keep the claim and drop the wrapper.
2. Trading one tic for another. A rewrite that swaps "here's the thing" for "the reality is" has done nothing. Prefer deletion over substitution.

Workflow

1. Identify the target. A file path, a range in a file, or a draft sitting in the conversation. If the user says "deslop this" with no target, use the most recent substantial prose in the conversation. If the target is ambiguous between two candidates, ask.

2. Read it in full. You cannot judge whether a sentence is load-bearing from a grep hit. Read the whole document before touching anything.

3. Scan mechanically.

python3 scripts/deslop_scan.py <file>

Flags: --colon-triple and --em-dash enable two patterns that are off by default because they are noisy in technical writing. --json for machine-readable output. Pass - to read stdin, which is how you scan a draft that only exists in the conversation:

python3 scripts/deslop_scan.py - <<'EOF'
<draft text>
EOF

The scanner is a starting point, not the specification. It has false positives (a legitimate "no X, no Y" in quoted dialogue) and it cannot see the patterns that need judgment (a paragraph that gestures at profundity without tripping any regex). Read references/patterns.md for the full catalogue, including the ones no regex catches.

4. Rewrite. Apply references/patterns.md hit by hit, then reread the whole thing for the patterns the scanner missed. Use Edit for files. For a conversation draft, output the rewritten text.

5. Verify. Re-run the scanner on the result. Every remaining hit needs a reason: quoted material, a false positive, or an intentional choice you flag to the user.

6. Report. Say what you cut and, briefly, what you deliberately left. Do not paste the scanner output at the user.

Rewrite principles

Delete first. Most slop is additive. "It's important to note that the parser is single-threaded" becomes "The parser is single-threaded." "Turns out the cache was never invalidated" becomes "The cache was never invalidated." The sentence gets shorter and truer at once.

Say the thing being gestured at. Patterns like "that's the part a counter can't reach", "the punchline is", and "here's the twist" are promises of content. If the content is in the next clause, keep it and drop the announcement. If there is no content, the sentence was empty and goes entirely.

Never invent to fill a gap. When a vague gesture turns out to have nothing behind it, cut it or ask the user what they meant. Do not manufacture a specific claim to make the sentence work. Same for "experts argue" and friends: either the source is knowable and gets named, or the claim gets stated as the author's own, or it goes.

Break the parallelism, don't rebalance it. "Not just faster, but cheaper" wants to become "faster and cheaper", not "not only faster but also cheaper". Same for "no X, no Y" chains: pick the one item that matters, or make it a plain list.

Let one sentence carry one idea. Echoing runs, repeated openers, and stacked questions are all the same underlying problem: an idea stated three times with the nouns swapped. State it once, keep the best example, drop the rest.

Keep the author's voice. A writer who is genuinely wry, or who genuinely likes short punchy sentences, is not sloppy. You are removing the tics an LLM applies uniformly, not sanding the prose down to neutral. When the surrounding text has a clear register, match it.

Leave alone: code blocks, inline code, command output, quoted text, citations, other people's words, and anything inside a fenced block. If a pattern appears in a quote, it stays.

Scope discipline

Deslopping is not general copyediting. Do not restructure sections, add or remove headings, reorder arguments, change technical claims, adjust tone beyond what removing a pattern requires, or fix things you merely dislike. If you notice a real problem outside scope (a wrong API name, a broken link), mention it separately rather than fixing it silently.

If a document is slop end to end and needs a rewrite rather than an edit pass, say so instead of producing a lightly de-tic'd version of a bad draft.