Coherent doesn't mean it's correct.
Saying it's completed doesn't always mean it's been checked.
Confidence doesn't mean it has provenance.
It looks like it works — but does it have the right effect?
Slop: fluent, plausible, confident output, unmoored from anything that checked it. Coherence without provenance: sounds finished, looks measured, reads as decided.
Coherence used to be a signal. If a document held together, someone had probably thought about it. Generative tools broke that. Now everything holds together, including nonsense.
slopstopper is a set of tools that catch slop in code. Each stands alone, and any combination of them works together as one system.
/plugin marketplace add slopstopper/marketplace
In use:
| tool | measures | in one line |
|---|---|---|
| plumb-line | whether claims are honest | provenance primitives (JS + Python) plus skills that audit for laundered uncertainty, and refuse to launder it back out during the fix. |
| tokenomics | which model should do the work | route work to the cheapest capable tier, name your own lanes (no defaults shipped), carry strategy across sessions in a playbook of reusable method. |
| recursive-spine | where tracked state lives | GitHub issues + milestones as the only home of work state; skills to teach, stamp, migrate, and digest it. Its own tracker existed before its first commit. |
Three concerns that don't overlap: honesty of claims, economics of effort, location of state. Shared vocabulary is pinned in the marketplace so one word can't mean three things.
More will follow.
plumb-line's audit skill was run against plumb-line and produced a remediation plan it then had to survive. recursive-spine's issues and milestones existed before its first commit, its labels were stamped by its own bootstrap, and its own deferrals age on its own digest. If a discipline is too heavy to follow while building the tool that states it, the discipline is wrong. Change the rule and leave the record alone.
When fluent tools meet real work:
| Risk | How it arrives |
|---|---|
| Laundered uncertainty | A mock value gets used as if it were measured. It ends up in a dashboard, then a decision, and nothing along the way marks it as a guess. |
| Self-graded homework | The tool that made the claim is the same tool that checks it. |
| Prose-ledger rot | Work tracked in a document drifts from reality almost immediately. Merges drop rows and the file still reads fine. |
| Silent deferral | A "later" that isn't written down anywhere usually just doesn't happen. |
| Economics slop | An expensive model running work a cheap one could do, or a cheap one running work it can't and having to redo it. |
| Overstated maturity | Everything gets called "production-ready," including things that aren't. |
/plugin marketplace add slopstopper/marketplace
then /plugin install any combination you want.
From live practice in a few real projects, written up as practice reports. We would love to tell you these tools are battle-tested; our own CI fails any README containing that phrase.
None of this stops you from shipping slop. It makes it visible, attributable, and slightly embarrassing.