Kid mode 🧒

When a robot writes, it likes to sound clever in the same few ways over and over, like saying "a worry with a flashlight taped to it." People can tell a robot wrote it. This is a robot-cleverness detector. You paste in writing, and it underlines every spot that sounds like a robot and tells you how to say it like a person instead. Brandon built it after catching a bunch of those phrases in one of his own pages.

↩ drwu-htmls

/deslop

the AI-slop hard gate · built 2026-07-03 · ~/.claude/skills/deslop/

A blocklist passes everything nobody has flagged yet. These tells use ordinary words in a manufactured shape, so word-level gates miss them. deslop gates the shape, hard-fails it, and hands you the plain rewrite for each hit.

It came out of a real failure this week. A skill's texture gate shipped a review green, and Brandon caught the AI tells by eye, one phrase at a time: "a coping mechanism with a record light on," then "the thesis with a birth certificate stapled to it," then "I want to name what saves it." A style gate is not a truth gate, and it is not a slop gate either. So the tells got measured against real speech, hard-gated, and packaged here.

The shapes it hard-fails

quip-rider sev3 personified-abstraction sev3 absurdist-attachment sev3 name / lands / sits verb sev3 it's-not-X-it's-Y sev3 the-[grand-noun]-of sev2 in-a-world sev2 essay-filler sev2 rhythmic-triple tic sev1

Plus the full canonical corpus: em-dash, ellipsis, antithesis in every form, "delve / tapestry / navigate", contrastive however/though/yet/while, and 40+ more from the shared tell list. Single source of truth, no duplicated patterns.

Before / after

quip-rider
AI
Call it a coping mechanism with a record light on.
human
He is coping, and the camera is how he does it.
absurdist-attachment
AI
It is the thesis with a birth certificate stapled to it.
human
It is the show's oldest thesis, made literal. This episode makes it true on paper.
name as metaphor verb (sev3)
AI
And I want to name what saves it, because the rescue is the best joke.
human
And look at what saves it, because the rescue is the best joke.
personified-abstraction
AI
That is genuinely bleak advice wearing a wedding suit.
human
That is genuinely bleak advice to give at a reception.
the [grand-noun] of [thing]
AI
That is the machine of the episode.
human
That is how the whole episode runs.

Run it

# gate a file, line-anchored report with a fix per hit
python3 ~/.claude/skills/deslop/deslop.py draft.md

# gate a chat draft on stdin
echo "$reply" | python3 ~/.claude/skills/deslop/deslop.py -

# output on a slop line:
  L2 [sev3] absurdist-attachment: "with a birth certificate stapled to"
     why: an absurdist object stapled to the point
     -> Drop the gag object. State the claim directly.

DESLOP: FAIL   # exit 1 on any sev-3, any strict SHAPE hit, or density over cap
DESLOP: PASS   # exit 0 clean

How it stays honest

Every pattern is calibrated against a real human-speech corpus, not invented. The quip-rider rate in 158,000 words of real podcast transcript is about 0.006 per 1000 words, so the density cap of 0.4 is generous and still catches a habit. When a new tell gets flagged, the loop is fixed: measure it against the corpus, add the pattern, scrub the artifact, reship, and record it in the catalog with a before/after. The gate reuses _shared/anti_ai_voice_gate.py so an escalation in one place propagates to every skill that calls it.