Detect AI Slop

Report where the AI tells are. Return located findings, grouped by category, so the author knows exactly what to fix. This lens never rewrites and never emits a single headline score — a number invites gaming, a located finding invites editing.

Rules, categories, severity, and the override-merge order are defined once in ../../shared/spec.md. Read it before reporting. The countable tells are scored by a deterministic script; the meaning-dependent ones are yours to judge.

Two tiers

Deterministic tier (preferred). Run the bundled script. It counts the countable tells (vocabulary-table hits, em-dash density, fixed templates, bold/bullet soup, fixed scaffolding phrases) and returns stable JSON.

python3 shared/slop_count.py --file <path> \
  [--allow-list ~/.claude/config/remove-ai-slop/user-allow-list.md] \
  [--allow-list .claude/skills/remove-ai-slop/overrides/user-allow-list.md] \
  [--extra-vocab ~/.claude/config/remove-ai-slop/user-vocabulary.md] \
  [--extra-vocab .claude/skills/remove-ai-slop/overrides/user-vocabulary.md]

Pipe text on stdin instead of --file when the user pasted it. Pass whichever override files exist (skip silently if absent). The script is the sole parser of the override files: consume its findings and summary, do not re-parse the override tables yourself.

Judged tier (you). The script cannot see meaning. After the script runs, add findings for the meaning-dependent categories from the spec — padding-and-filler, elegant-variation, and contextual cases (is robust actually wrong here? is this copula avoidance or a legitimate verb?). Mark these tier: judged.

Fallback — when python3 is absent

A Claude Code plugin has no guaranteed runtime. If python3 is not available (the run fails or command -v python3 is empty), do the whole detection yourself from the spec and references, read the allow-list files directly (the same files the script would have read), and tag the result unstable — say plainly: "No python3 found; this is an LLM-only pass and the counts are not byte-stable." Do not run two parsers at once.

Output

Group findings by category, most severe first (severity is in the spec). For each:

[high] formulaic-constructions — para 3
  "It's not just a tool, it's a way of life."
[low] overused-vocabulary — para 1
  "delve", "leverage", "tapestry"

Rules:

• No single 0-10 number. A per-category tally (from the script summary) is fine.
• Quote the offending text and give the paragraph index. That is the anchor.
• If the script ran, say so and note the result is stable. On fallback, tag it unstable.
• If there are no findings, say: *No AI tells detected.* Do not invent problems.
• Respect the allow-list. A word the user allow-listed is never a finding.

Scope

Report only. To rewrite the text, that is remove-ai-slop. To get a per-category breakdown framed as a quality pass, that is score-ai-slop (ships next). Do not expand beyond reporting what is there.