No Slop

no-slop — dense prose, nothing lost

AI prose fails in two directions at once: it is verbose (filler, restatement, decoration) and thin (claims without specifics). This skill fixes both. The output contract: every sentence carries new information, and no information is lost.

This is a modifier, not a workflow. Once invoked, its rules apply to all user-facing prose you produce for the current task — reports, summaries, PR bodies, README sections, briefings, explanations. It does not change what work you do; it changes how you write the result.

Invocation modes

The three rules

1. Delete slop (cut without loss)

Cut anything that a reader could delete without losing information. The recognition patterns live in references/slop-taxonomy.md — the canonical, growable list. The headline categories:

• Ritual openings and closings ("In this report, I will…", "I hope this helps")
• Restating the question or the task before answering it
• Contentless emphasis ("this is very important" with no why)
• Stacked hedges ("it could potentially be possible that")
• Saying the same thing twice in different words; conclusions that re-summarize the body
• Structure that outweighs substance: bullet sprawl, heading-per-sentence, bold/emoji decoration
• Explaining the obvious to the audience at hand

2. Densify (thin content is also slop)

Deleting filler is not enough — the remaining sentences must carry weight:

• Ground claims only with support already present in the source or verified task context. Preserve a substantive source claim that lacks support, but mark it explicitly as unverified or open; never invent facts, evidence, names, paths, outcomes, or certainty to make prose denser.
• Replace vague quantities with the actual items when the source supplies them ("several issues" → name the three). Otherwise preserve the vagueness or mark the quantity unspecified.
• Replace abstract verbs with the concrete action ("handle it properly" → what happens, when).
• Prefer one precise sentence over three approximate ones.

3. Preserve (compression is not omission)

Compression removes redundancy. Omission removes information. Only compression is allowed. Never cut:

• Facts, numbers, file paths, names
• Caveats, limitations, failure conditions
• Reasons behind judgments and decisions
• Steps the reader must perform

When unsure whether something is redundancy or information, keep it. A dense text that silently dropped a caveat is worse than a verbose one that kept it — the reader can skim verbosity but cannot recover a missing warning.

Self-verification (must-fire, two passes)

After drafting any deliverable prose, before presenting it:

1. Density pass — read each sentence and ask "what new information does this carry?" Cut or merge any sentence with no answer.
2. Preservation pass — list the names, identifiers, facts, numbers, commands, file paths, constraints, ordered steps, prerequisites, failure conditions, caveats, uncertainty, and reasons in your pre-cut draft (or source text, in rewrite mode); confirm each one survives in the final text. Anything missing goes back in.

Do not skip pass 2 to save time — over-cutting is this skill's primary failure mode, and it is invisible without the check.

Calibration

• Dense ≠ terse. Write complete sentences; drop fragments and arrow chains ("A → B → fails") that force the reader to reconstruct your meaning. Readability outranks brevity.
• Match the reader: an expert needs less scaffolding, a newcomer needs more explanation — explanation for a reader who needs it is information, not slop.
• Structure (headings, tables, bullets) is allowed when it carries organization the prose can't; it is slop when it decorates content that one paragraph would state better.
• Worked before/after examples: references/examples.md. Read them once per session when this skill activates — they calibrate the cut line better than the rules alone.