stopslop

A deterministic linter, written in Rust, for the tells AI leaves in code and prose: 57 rules, one static binary, no model at scan time.

Docs · Rules · Changelog

Install

cargo install stopslop

From the latest main, or from a local checkout:

cargo install --git https://github.com/mgiovani/stopslop
cargo install --path .

Usage

stopslop .                 # lint the current directory
stopslop --since origin/main   # lint only the files changed on this branch

tests/fixtures/typescript/slop_attribution.ts:1:1 SLOP004 AI attribution / chat-export artifact in comment
tests/fixtures/typescript/slop_elision.ts:3:3 SLOP001 elision comment may have replaced real code
tests/fixtures/markdown/slop_residue.md:3:1 SLOP011 unedited assistant-response residue in prose
    fix: delete the sentence

Tier A findings exit 1 and fail CI. Tier B findings warn. See usage for formats (text, JSON, SARIF, Markdown), baselines and exit codes.

Why stopslop

• Reads what other linters skip. ESLint, Ruff, and Clippy treat comment and string content as trivia, which is where // ... rest of code unchanged and a leaked "Certainly! Here's..." preamble end up. See why.
• Deterministic. Every rule is a tree-sitter AST match or a regex over extracted comment, string or prose text. Same input, same output, with no LLM call, API call, or network access at scan time.
• CI-ready tiers. Tier A is mechanical and fails the run; Tier B warns. Tier C stays opt-in until a labelled corpus has scored it.
• Code, prose, stylesheets, and images. Source code and documents, .css and .scss stylesheets (the design group reads generated-UI tells, see style linting), plus the metadata of PNG, JPEG and WebP images.
• English and Brazilian Portuguese. Phrase panels for both run by default.
• Measured. just corpus scores every rule against labelled human and AI corpora; see benchmarks.
• Fast and quiet to adopt. One binary and no config to start. --staged and --since lint only a diff, and a baseline grandfathers old findings.

What it catches

57 rules in 9 groups. --list-rules prints every rule with its group, tier, and state.

Group	What it covers
artifact	Mechanical leftovers from a generation session: chat turns, tool tokens, unfilled slots
structure	Structural code smells: swallowed errors, escaped types, stubs, speculative abstraction
stdlib	Code that rebuilds something the standard library or the platform already provides
rhetoric	Formulaic rhetorical shapes: clichés, staged reveals, manufactured significance
verbosity	Words that cost the reader something and return nothing: hedging, filler, padding
sourcing	Claims with no checkable source behind them
format	Typographic and Markdown affectations
provenance	Embedded image metadata that names how or by what an image was made
design	Visual tells of generated UI, read from CSS, style=, and utility classes

The per-rule table is in docs/rules.md.

Tier	Default	Effect
A	on (14 rules)	A finding exits 1 and blocks CI. Mechanical artifacts with no legitimate reading.
B	on (37 rules) or off (3 rules)	Judgment calls that warn and never exit 1. fail-on-tier = "B" makes them fail.
C	off (3 rules)	Thresholds not yet scored against a labelled corpus. Opt in with --extend-select.

Configuration

# stopslop.toml
ignore = ["SLOP009", "verbosity"]   # rule codes or groups to subtract
extend-select = ["SLOP033"]         # add a rule on top of the defaults
fail-on-tier = "A"                  # lowest tier that exits 1

[per-file-ignores]
"docs/**" = ["SLOP036"]

stopslop --help-config prints an annotated file with every key. Details, user-defined rules, and --check-imports are in docs/configuration.md. To silence one finding, put // ai-slop-ignore above it; see suppression.

CI

stopslop --staged            # pre-commit hook
stopslop --since origin/main # pull request check
stopslop --format sarif .    # GitHub code scanning

Non-goals

• Not an AI-origin verdict. A rule may name a span as a known AI tell so you can rewrite it. stopslop never scores a whole file as written by AI and never runs a model.
• Not a correctness checker. It does not run your code or detect hallucinated methods.
• [[custom-rule]] is a phrase matcher, not a plugin system.

The full list is in docs/why.md.

Contributing

Read AGENTS.md for the architecture, the checklist for adding a rule, and the test gates.

License

MIT (see LICENSE).

stopslop's own CI fails if its source contains slop: every push runs cargo run --quiet -- . against the whole repo, prose included, alongside cargo fmt, cargo clippy, and cargo test. Tier A findings fail the build; Tier B findings print as warnings, the same contract users get.