56 pointsby Heavykennyan hour ago20 comments
  • ronbenton24 minutes ago
    Petition to rename this “SlopCop”
  • jhack4 minutes ago
    This is a great idea. Even if you're one of those developers squarely focused on getting the final result working, code quality still matters (to people and LLMs).

    Everyone should be doing regular code reviews and this helps a lot.

    • tolawuwoa minute ago
      Thanks for the feedback. Really appreciate it
  • sinansaka10 minutes ago
    I was about to write what advantage it has over linters but then saw the built on section. Good work. We use megalinter with our flavour of go and vite rules, plus extensive e2e testing after each agent run. Quality of the spec driven agentic PRs are significantly better than the baseline. Megalinter is quite resource heavy and slow, so will definitely check this out
    • Heavykenny5 minutes ago
      Thank you, really appreciate. Feel free to create issue if you have any
  • fishgoesblub28 minutes ago
    Apparently I need to check in with a Doctor because code written by myself is seen as AI, and the lazy AI bits aren't. More Human than Human?
    • add-sub-mul-div18 minutes ago
      Unfortunately, AI detection can never be assumed to be accurate for the same reason the AI itself can never be assumed to be accurate.

      (Not that I think you didn't probably already know that.)

  • bigfishrunningan hour ago
    A linter with rules for AI-specific weirdness is absolutely a great idea, thank you! Are there any plans to support other languages besides javascript?
    • Heavykennyan hour ago
      Thank you. I currently support up to 8 languages: php, go, rust, python, js and ts
      • MonstraG37 minutes ago
        thats 6?
        • ryandrake30 minutes ago
          The thread just became meta-ironic, with regard to AI hallucinations.
        • xnorswap22 minutes ago
          Perhaps they're counting PHP as 3 languages in a trench coat
        • genghisjahn35 minutes ago
          7 and 8 are left as an exercise for the reader.
          • stymaar31 minutes ago
            I have the implementation for languages 7 and 8 but it's too big to fit in this comment section.
        • Hovertruck7 minutes ago
          The README also lists Java and Ruby
        • Retr0id31 minutes ago
          well, they did say "up to" 8
  • n0x110310 minutes ago
    Gave it a try but there were a lot of false positives. SQLModel's exec method for example gets flagged every time thinking it's python's exec() function.
  • bratsche17 minutes ago
    For anyone who wants something like this for Elixir, there is an open source hex package: https://hex.pm/packages/ex_slop
  • macNchz24 minutes ago
    I don’t see if this is one of the covered cases, but one of the more common and nefarious patterns I run into is what you might call "sweeping exceptions under the rug." I think the agent’s motivation to get things running encourages these antipatterns of designing routines that are fault tolerant in a sort of maladaptive way: e.g. catching an error, logging a warning that something didn’t work, and continuing, but with now potentially missing/broken state.

    This has bitten me a couple of times, and it’s surprisingly annoying to nudge agents into good/resilient patterns or identify situations that should fail loudly, at least in my experience. The retry mechanisms they come up with on their own are often pretty terrible as well.

    I’ll note, though, that I have seen this from human engineers plenty of times, and at least the AI usually adds some logs rather than just totally silently absorbing an exception!

  • ryandrake25 minutes ago
    I think a lot of the telltale signs of AI can be found in the comments. Besides the slop writing style, I've found AI comments to 1. be overly verbose, 2. unnecessarily describe before/after code state (# This function used to do foo, but now it does bar), and 3. reference its own internal "plan" (# This function is part of Stage 3 of the implementation of Use Case X from the requirements doc) WTF is Stage 3? - says code reader 2 years from now. Although I bet you can probably prompt these behaviors away.
  • throw03172019an hour ago
    > I’ve been building aislop.

    This made me chuckle.

    Cool tool, the dead code checks can be very helpful. I’ve seen Claude leave unused functions when iterating which always frustrates me.

    • Heavykenny34 minutes ago
      haha. I love the name - aislop
      • Retr0id29 minutes ago
        Forgot to switch accounts?
        • beart26 minutes ago
          OP seems to be an AI account.

          > Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans.

  • eithed40 minutes ago
    Can you explain the benefits of running this over rector / eslint? (and to certain degree phpstan / deptrac)
  • sync36 minutes ago
    I tried it on my codebase. There's a lot of overlap with tools like Oxlint / ESLint, I'm not sure that's too valuable vs. a more focused tool that actually focuses solely on 'slop' signals. These lint rules tend to get very opinionated which is why those tools expose so many configuration options.

    One real bug tho:

    > [ERROR] Imports "mdast" but it's not declared in package.json

    A type-only import like `import type { Blockquote, RootContent } from 'mdast';` is actually acceptable if `"@types/mdast": "^4.0.4"` is included in the package.json.

    • Heavykenny29 minutes ago
      thanks for this catch, really appreciate. Can you create an issue on GitHub so you can easily track when I resolve this?
  • hootzan hour ago
    Ran it in my codebase, detected some good stuff, was able to pass the issues to my agent so they can be validated and fixed. Good job!

    I'd love for it to have flags for Pi and Crush too :)

    • Heavykennyan hour ago
      Thank you, really appreciate.
  • vinnymac29 minutes ago
    I tried it but see a lot of false positives.

    One funny thing I see it doing is deleting seemingly random comments lines, for example if a file has a comment that spans multiple lines but doesn’t use a multi line comment syntax. It just chooses one at random transforming the once useful comment into slop.

    • tolawuwo4 minutes ago
      Thanks for the feedback, we’ll check that out
  • maddhruvhn35 minutes ago
    awesome work, someone is caring about using less token :clap:
  • Der_Einzigean hour ago
    Related, we made "Antislop", a framework for removing repetitive phraseology from LLMs: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061
  • 34 minutes ago
    undefined
  • cumshitpiss35 minutes ago
    [dead]
  • pixel_poppingan hour ago
    The intent is good, but frankly, credibility is lost by using "slop" words imo, OP you might seriously want to re-evaluate who is the target market, probably users that leverage high automation 24/7, startups and so-on, they don't want to incorporate products that talks about the modern way (and somehow only way to compete) of development as "slop" imo because soon enough, it's not true anymore (it's already not true with the right tooling).
    • trollbridge35 minutes ago
      Imagine an operating system company making a product called “quick and dirty”.
    • hootzan hour ago
      Yeah, to be honest, it really is a bit weird to incorporate a tool called slop into a corporate CICD flow. Anubis fixed a similar problem by creating a corp-safe version without the anime mascot.
      • Aurornisan hour ago
        > Anubis fixed a similar problem by creating a corp-safe version without the anime mascot.

        I wouldn’t say they fixed it. Rather it was an intentional choice to put an anime girl on websites unless you paid for the product.

        • hootz22 minutes ago
          Fair, I guess that doesn't apply here then, as I don't think the intention of OP is to drive corps away from the main free product.
  • axodan hour ago
    I don't think this approach is wise.

    Concentrate on code quality, and whether it does what it needs to do. Not whether it was written by AI or not.

    • Heavykennyan hour ago
      Thanks, I actually concentrated on improving code quality, the patterns I flagged are poor design choices that humans wouldn’t write. Examples are duplicated functions doing same thing, dead or redundant codes etc. These builds up and degrade the codebase over time.
      • axodan hour ago
        > ...are poor design choices that humans wouldn’t write.

        They certainly do in my experience. Maybe you've been lucky and haven't worked with really messy programmers.

        • Heavykenny44 minutes ago
          I have worked and seen these in code reviews but the issue now is code reviews are overwhelming and non existent in some cases.
    • bigfishrunningan hour ago
      I'm interpreting this not as a "catch ai submissions gotcha" tool, but as a "last pass in review catch mistakes AI made that i may have missed" tool. Having more linters is a good thing IMO (I say this as someone who doesn't use AI to generate code, but works with people who do and has to review a lot of AI generated code)
      • tolawuwo6 minutes ago
        Exactly, that’s what it does. You can see the tool as a quality gate you put in place to ensure that any AI generated code meets a standard.