Anti-Slop Protocol: Human Signal Enforcement

Combined negative and positive constraint set. When active for a piece, you are forbidden from the patterns below and required to hit the quotas below. During the mandatory self-audit step, scan the draft for every pattern listed, rewrite any sentence containing one, and confirm every quota before delivering output. If a quota cannot be met honestly, report it. Never pad to hit a number.

Scope

Applies only to prose deliverables. Code, code comments, commit messages, and short CLI replies are out of scope. When co-active with the listen skill, this protocol is the quality gate for drafts before they are accepted.

1. Banned emotional shortcuts (highest priority)

The Named Feeling — stating an emotion instead of causing it.

• Prohibited: "I was frustrated." "It was exciting." "I felt proud of what we built." "It was a humbling experience." "I couldn't believe what I was seeing."
• Why it fails: naming a feeling asks the reader to take your word for it, and a reader who is told what to feel feels nothing. It is also the cheapest sentence in the language to produce, which is exactly why models reach for it first.
• Fix (Evidence Principle): delete the label and write the thing that caused it. "I was frustrated" becomes "the fourth build failed at 2am and I put the laptop in a drawer." The reader supplies the word.

The Clean Resolution — every thread tied off, every lesson learned, the piece landing in a state of completion.

• Prohibited: "And that's when it all clicked." "Looking back, I wouldn't change a thing." "The lesson here is simple."
• Why it fails: real experience leaves loose ends. A piece where everything resolves was constructed backwards from its conclusion, and readers can feel the reverse-engineering.
• Fix: leave one thing unfixed and say so plainly. Name what you still do not know.

2. Banned rhythm patterns

The Metronome — consecutive sentences of near-identical length.

• Prohibited: three sentences in a row within five words of each other.
• Required: at least one sentence under five words and one over thirty in every section.
• Why it fails: sentence-length variance is the single most measurable difference between human and machine prose. Machines write at a steady pulse. People speed up, stall, interrupt themselves, then run long.
• Fix (Variance Rule): after drafting, count the words in each sentence and break any run of three similar ones.

The Uniform Block — every paragraph the same size.

• Prohibited: a page where every paragraph is three to four lines.
• Fix: some paragraphs run six lines, some run one. At least two single-sentence paragraphs per piece.

3. Banned abstraction

The Weightless Noun — a general word standing where a specific one belongs.

• Prohibited: "businesses", "solutions", "a tool", "results", "the industry", "stakeholders", "content"
• Why it fails: abstraction costs nothing to generate and proves nothing. Specificity is the only quality that cannot be faked cheaply, which is why its absence reads as machine output.
• Fix (Specificity Quota): per 500 words, minimum three proper nouns, one physical detail with a sense attached, one time anchor, and one true detail that is irrelevant to the argument.

The Round Number — figures that end in zero or five.

• Prohibited: "about 50%", "roughly 3x", "around $10k", "hundreds of hours"
• Why it fails: real measurement produces ugly numbers. A round number tells the reader you estimated or invented it.
• Fix: 47%, 2.8x, $9,340, 213 hours. Minimum two non-round numbers per 500 words. If the real figure is unknown, say you are estimating rather than smoothing it.

4. Banned safety

The Balanced Take — hedging both sides so the sentence cannot be argued with.

• Prohibited: "might", "could potentially", "in many cases", "some would argue", "while X, it is also true that Y"
• Why it fails: text nobody can disagree with is text nobody remembers or shares.
• Fix: one claim per piece stated flat, with no balancing paragraph after it. If you are not willing to defend it in the replies, cut it entirely rather than hedging it.

The Costless Claim — advice from someone who risked nothing.

• Why it fails: authority comes from having paid for the knowledge. Text with no cost attached reads as compiled rather than lived.
• Fix: name one real cost — money, hours, a relationship or a reputation — and one moment you were wrong. Do not soften either.

5. Banned borrowed language

The Inherited Sentence — phrasing that could appear word for word in any other piece on this topic, including anything lifted from material the user pastes as reference.

• Why it fails: it is both the loudest generic-writing signal and a genuine originality risk.
• Fix: reference material sets direction, never wording. Quotes maximum fifteen words, always attributed. When using a fact from a source, restate the underlying mechanism in your own construction rather than paraphrasing the sentence. Flag any sentence you suspect is inherited.

6. Required: the one wrong note

Uniform polish is itself a tell. Include exactly one deliberate imperfection: a sentence that runs slightly too long, a tangent that pays off two paragraphs later, a joke that lands a little dry, or a bracketed aside that undercuts the sentence before it. One only. Two reads as carelessness.

7. Mandatory self-audit

Before delivering, output this filled in:

named emotions found (must be 0):
clean resolution present (must be false):
shortest sentence / longest sentence, in words:
three-in-a-row length violation (must be false):
paragraph length range:
proper nouns per 500w (min 3):
non-round numbers per 500w (min 2):
sensory detail / time anchor / irrelevant true detail:
unhedged strong claim:
cost admitted:
unresolved thread:
wrong note used:
suspected inherited sentences:

Fix every failure, then deliver. Finally, list three phrases you almost used and cut for being generic.

Honesty rules

• Quotas that cannot be met honestly are reported as unmet, never padded.
• "I was wrong" / cost / unresolved-thread fields must describe real facts from the source material; if none exist, write "none available" rather than inventing one.
• The self-audit is part of the deliverable's working process; for very short pieces (under ~100 words) report a one-line audit summary instead of the full block.