unslop — remove the vibecoded look at the root, prove the crafted floor

Someone says "this looks vibecoded" or "make it feel premium and crafted with care". unslop runs one arc over the whole codebase and ends with a PR whose gate is green or whose remaining reds are named and handed to a human — never a cosmetic pass over the pages someone happened to open.

The one rule

Fix the class, not the example — and prove it on the rendered result.

A default (Inter, Lucide, purple-to-black, rounded-2xl, glass cards, em dashes) is declared in one place and consumed in forty. Edit the one place. Then screenshot at 1280 and 390 and run the gate; reasoning is not validation. Twenty-six of the thirty tells are surface and a prompt removes them; the four that are absence of substance (no real demo, no loading states, no TOS, no privacy policy) are removed only by the real product — the gate keeps them red until a human makes them true.

Deterministic core (scripts/)

Stdlib Python, no edits to the target, any framework (Next app/pages, SvelteKit, Astro, Nuxt, Remix, Vite+React, static HTML). The detector is composed: it is found in the installed impeccable skill or via npx impeccable detect; when absent the survey says unavailable and the gate WARNs — it never pretends classes A–C were checked. Override with UNSLOP_DETECTOR="node /path/detect.mjs".

The arc (references/arc.md — read it before running)

0 Snapshot → 1 Survey → 2 Direction (decide once, DESIGN.md) → 3 Root plan
→ 4 Fix at root → 5 Structure + copy → 6 Class D (states · legal · evidence · truth)
→ 7 Render + inspect at 1280/390 → 8 Gate → 9 PR + report

Never hand control back mid-arc. Never ask "what style do you want?" — infer the direction from the product's own material and state it in DESIGN.md; if there is none, choose the quietest committed world and say so. Never fabricate substance (policy text, testimonials, demos) to turn a red green.

Composition map (bstack-native names; generic behavior in parentheses)

References

• references/arc.md — the nine steps, with what each composes and the anti-rationalizations.
• references/crafted-floor.md — the operational definition of "crafted" (typography · spacing · color · motion · states · copy · a11y · perf · consistency · trust), every rule tagged [M] machine-checkable or [J] judgment, sourced (Kowalski, Freiberg, Linear, Comeau, Refactoring UI, Butterick, Rams, Apple, Material, GOV.UK, Vercel, Stripe, NN/g, Fogg, WCAG, web.dev), contradictions resolved explicitly.
• references/tells.md — the dated, regenerable list of current LLM defaults (the reel's 30 → class → machine check), Vercel's reject list, the no-ai-slop prose-pattern catalog (dated), and why a static ban-list decays.
• references/root-cause-playbook.md — per root kind: where the default lives, the one edit, the order.

Anti-rationalization

Validation (skill self-test)

• python3 -m pytest tests/ green (survey + gate, both polarities, waivers, strict, evidence, CLI, and one regression per P20 finding — every case a false positive or fail-open a reviewer hit on a real repo).
• Dogfood: scripts/unslop_survey.py <a real repo> --detect produces roots with a root_file; the detector status is ok when impeccable is installed and unavailable (never a silent pass) when not.
• unslop_gate.py on the crafted fixture exits 0 with evidence; on the sloppy fixture exits 1 naming fonts.deliberate, substance.legal, substance.placeholders, motion.reduced-motion among others.
• skillify gate: skillify_check.py skills/design/unslop --run-tests exits 0.

Provenance

BRO-2184. Origin: /checkit on an Instagram reel ("30 reasons your site looks vibecoded", 2026-08-15, 34k likes) → research/entities/pattern/vibecoded-tells.md (the 26-surface / 4-substance finding) → this skill. Research synthesis: research/notes/2026-08-18-unslop-what-others-point-to-synthesis.md.