Unslop

Unslop

Edit text to remove AI patterns.

Process

1. Run a first round: one opus agent, every rule below, the documents in the pass.
2. Verify each finding, then rewrite. Preserve meaning, match intended tone.
3. Run a second round: a fresh agent, the rewritten documents, and the first round's applied report. It checks every applied fix is still in place and flags anything that changed back; verify and re-apply what really slipped, and the pass ends.

How to scan

The pass is two rounds: the first finds, the second guards what the first fixed.

A fresh agent each round is the point. An agent that has seen its own last report defends the report, repeats what you rejected, and stops looking for what it missed. The second round's agent sees the first round's report on purpose. Its job is not to re-litigate the findings but to verify they survived.

The author cannot run this pass alone, whatever the rules say. Whoever wrote a sentence already decided it earns its place, and that is the judgement the rules ask for.

Agents write nothing. When the text is a draft not yet on disk, save it to a temporary file first so it does not travel through the dispatch message. When the pass covers several documents, one agent takes all of them in the same round, since a sentence that repeats what another document already says is only visible with both open.

Prompts

The first round:

You are doing an editing pass. Read <the file or files>. Do not edit anything.
Do not read anything else.

Apply ONLY the rules below. Read every sentence, and at each one ask what the
reader does differently because of it. Flag the sentence when the answer is
nothing, when it is the answer an earlier sentence already gave, or when it
breaks one of the rules. Report only what one of these rules covers.

RULES:
<every rule under Patterns to detect and fix, verbatim, numbers included>

EXCLUSIONS: an adjectival participle ("the bullets that are missing", "before a
change is done") is not a passive under 29, and an adverb that changes
the truth of the sentence ("skip it silently", "usually already") stays.

OUTPUT: one line per finding, in this format:
<file>:<line> | rule <n> | "<exact quoted span>" | <proposed rewrite>
Only sentences with a finding get a line. End with a line TOTAL: <n>.
Nothing else. No preamble, no summary.

The second round:

You are verifying an editing pass. Read <the file or files> and the report
below. Do not edit anything. Do not read anything else.

For every finding in the report, check the rewritten text still carries its
fix: the pattern the finding cited is gone and the rewrite kept every fact.
Report only findings whose fix is gone or undone, in this format:
<file>:<line> | rule <n> | "<exact quoted span>"
End with a line TOTAL: <n>. Nothing else. No preamble, no summary.

REPORT:
<the applied findings from the first round, verbatim>

Between rounds

Every line is a claim, not an edit. For each one, reread the span and confirm that it is an instance of the rule cited, that the rewrite keeps every fact and the tone, and that the wording it replaces is not the house form the surrounding documents already use. Drop what fails, apply the rest, then run the second round.

The second round's lines are claims too. Reread each and confirm the fix really is gone or undone before re-applying. When the pass ends, report what both rounds found and what the second round caught slipping back.

Patterns to detect and fix

Rule numbers are stable ids that other skills cite. A removed rule leaves a gap.

Content

3. Superficial -ing phrases. "highlighting...", "ensuring...", "reflecting...", "showcasing...", "fostering...". Delete or expand with real sources.
4. Vague attributions. "Experts believe", "Industry reports suggest", "Some critics argue". Name the source or delete.

Language

7. AI vocabulary. Additionally, crucial, delve, enduring, enhance, fostering, garner, interplay, intricate, landscape (abstract), pivotal, showcase, tapestry (abstract), testament, underscore, vibrant. Replace with plain words.
8. Fancy ways to say "is". "serves as", "stands as", "boasts", "features". Just say "is" or "has".
9. "Not just X, but Y." State the point directly instead.
10. Rule of three. Forcing ideas into groups of three. Use the natural number.
11. Synonym cycling. Protagonist, main character, central figure, hero all in one paragraph. Pick one, repeat it.
12. False ranges. "from X to Y" where X and Y aren't on a meaningful scale. List topics directly.

Style

13. Em dash overuse. Avoid em dashes entirely. Use periods or commas only (no parentheses, no en dashes, no hyphen-as-dash substitutes). If a thought needs separation, end the sentence or use a comma.
14. Colon overuse. Colons are fine before a list or example. Not as mid-sentence connectors. "If you're coming from traditional automation: instead of registering event handlers, you describe conditions" adds nothing with the colon. Rewrite to let the point stand on its own without comparison framing. "Describing when the scheduler should fire works best as plain English." Same meaning, no crutch punctuation.
15. Boldface overuse. Don't bold every proper noun or acronym.
16. Inline-header lists. The tell is a bold label and colon that restates the line: "Performance: Performance improved...". Convert those to prose. A bold lead-in that ends in a period, names the item, and is followed by genuinely new detail ("Schema in TypeScript. Tables live in one file.") is fine, not a tell.
17. Title case headings. Use sentence case.
18. Decorative emojis. Remove from headings and bullets.
19. Curly quotes. Replace with straight quotes.

Communication artifacts

20. Chatbot phrases. "I hope this helps!", "Let me know if...", "Of course!", "Certainly!", "Found the smoking gun!" Remove.
21. Sycophantic tone. "Great question! You're absolutely right!" Respond directly.

Filler

23. Filler phrases. "In order to" becomes "To". "Due to the fact that" becomes "Because". "It is important to note that" gets deleted.
24. Excessive hedging. "could potentially possibly be argued that it might" becomes "may".
25. Generic conclusions. "The future looks bright." State specific plans or facts.

Jargon

26. Abstract metaphor nouns. Substrate, wedge, vector, locus, vantage, nexus, primitive (as noun), harness (as metaphor), surface (as in "API surface"), bedrock, scaffolding (as metaphor), modality, paradigm, gold-plating, ratchet (as metaphor), evacuate (for moving code), endgame, north star, flywheel. These read as technical but usually have a plainer concrete word. "Substrate" becomes "base". "Wedge in" becomes "add". "Vector" becomes "way" or "method". "Gold-plating" becomes "more than the job needs". "Ratchet" becomes the mechanism's real name or "a limit that only tightens". "Evacuate" becomes "move out". "Endgame" becomes "the last phase". Pick the concrete word.

Plain speech

27. Say what it does, not how it feels. "the database stays close at hand", "SQL you can read", "types that follow your schema" name a feeling. The fix names the mechanism or a number: ".toSQL() returns the exact string sent to the database", "a column rename fails the build". Ask what the sentence tells the reader to do or know, then write that. If you can't restate it as a concrete instruction, fact, or number, cut it. One more check: if the sentence could appear unchanged in another project's docs, it says nothing about this one. Cut it.
28. Shorten or split dense sentences. If the reader has to backtrack to parse a sentence, break it in two or drop clauses. One idea per sentence.
29. Active voice. Prefer it. Catch "is/are/was/were + past participle" and name the actor: "queries are validated" becomes "the compiler validates queries", "the file is parsed by the loader" becomes "the loader parses the file". Passive is fine only when the actor is unknown or genuinely doesn't matter.
30. Cut adverbs, or use a stronger verb. "runs quickly" becomes "is fast" or the number. "significantly improves" becomes the measured delta. An adverb propping up a weak verb means the verb is wrong.
31. Prefer the plain word. "utilize" becomes "use", "leverage" becomes "use", "facilitate" becomes "help", "numerous" becomes "many", "in the event that" becomes "if". The fancier synonym is rarely clearer.
32. Mannered prose. Metaphor or flourish where a literal phrase exists: aphorisms ("wire it or delete it"), rhetorical fragments for effect, personified code ("the plan holds it"), figurative verbs ("rides along", "stands on"), stock framing phrases. "A dial worth turning" becomes "a parameter worth varying". Say what you mean. Rule 26 covers the metaphor nouns.
33. Over-compression. Dropped articles, verbless fragments, symbol-speak, and abbreviations that make the reader decode instead of read. "Parser rejects bad date → exit 2, no write" becomes "The parser rejects a bad date, exits with code 2, and writes nothing." Write whole sentences with their articles and verbs, and spell out arrows and abbreviations.
34. Describing the message instead of writing it. Some words refer to the subject. Others refer to the text itself: how many parts it has, what order they come in, that something is about to arrive, that you are about to say it. The second kind carries no information, because the thing being announced arrives in the very next words anyway. Delete it. Then confirm the deletion by checking that every fact survived. These spans sit anywhere in a sentence, not only in front of a colon. At the front: "Two things to take into account:" and "One thing worth doing now:" and "Processing X, the next step is:". Mid-sentence: "the config is fine, but there is one thing worth flagging here". Inside a clause: "I should mention that the build fails on ARM" becomes "the build fails on ARM". Trailing: "which brings us to the next point" just goes. Same rule for headings: name what is in the section ("Issues found", "Considerations"), do not count it or trail it ("Two things to consider", "What follows"). A count also goes stale the moment an item is added or removed.
35. Restating what you just said. A second pass over the same idea, in different words at the same level of detail, telling a reader who understood the first pass nothing new. "That is the thing being deleted" after already naming what to delete. "In other words", "put differently", "that is to say" followed by a paraphrase rather than a sharpening. A closing sentence that recaps the paragraph above it, or an opening sentence and a closing sentence that state the same thesis around a body that already made it. Ask what the reader can do or know after the second version that they could not after the first. If the answer is nothing, cut it. Keep a restatement only when it adds precision, gives a concrete example, or translates a term the first version assumed the reader knew. 16 is one narrow instance of this, a bold lead that restates its own line.
36. Pronoun referent overload. The same pronoun standing for two different things in one sentence, or a relative pronoun dropped where the wrong attachment is the easier parse. "The counts alone do not show a sentence appearing twice, a unit whose text also appears inside the unit before it, or any text it says was left behind": the first "it" is the unit, the second is the tool from the sentence before, and "any text it says was left behind" dropped its "that", so "it says" reads as the verb until "was" breaks the parse. Name the referent, or restore the "that": "inside the previous unit", "any text the tool says was left behind". 28's backtrack test finds the sentence, but splitting cannot repair it: a short sentence can still make the reader resolve one word twice.
37. Negation where a positive fits. Double negatives ("not uncommon", "not unlike", "nothing prevents") make the reader invert twice to recover a plain fact, and "not about" framing ("the question is not about X", "this is not a matter of Y") says what something is not while leaving what it is unstated. State the fact: "not uncommon" becomes "common", "not unlike" becomes "like", "the question is not about X" becomes naming what the question is about. A single honest negative stays ("the item does not fail").