What is this thing?

Your writing sounds like it was "delving" into a "tapestry" of "multifaceted" ideas and "testament"-ing its way to a conclusion? SlopCheck knows.

It's a fully offline, zero-dependency AI-prose detector that reads your text the way a tired English teacher reads a suspicious essay, then hands back a cold, hard score.

No GPU. No API key. No cloud. No excuses.

Why developers actually like it

Get it running (30 seconds, we timed it)

pip install slopcheck-cli

Point it at a file:

slopcheck doc.txt --explain

Or pipe anything into its mouth:

echo "delving into multifaceted layers" | slopcheck -

Sample verdict

slopcheck: stdin
Score: 45/100  (medium AI-signal density)

Phrase matches         5/40
Sentence rhythm        15/20
Punctuation             10/15
Paragraph uniformity   10/15
Lexical diversity        5/10

Flagged spans:
  L1: "...delving into this multifaceted ecosystem..."

  Heuristic estimate, not proof. False positives happen
    on formal/corporate writing and non-native English styles.

How Sniffy actually smells the slop

Five independent signals, no ML, no black box:

• 📖 Phrase matcher: greedy scan against a weighted bank of known AI clichés
• 🎵 Sentence rhythm: flags suspiciously uniform sentence lengths (real humans ramble)
• ✒️ Punctuation signature: em-dash, colon, and parenthesis frequency checked against a bot-like baseline
• 📐 Paragraph uniformity: every paragraph exactly the same size? Suspicious.
• 🔤 Lexical diversity: Type-Token Ratio checks if your vocabulary is actually alive

CLI cheat sheet

slopcheck <file|->     # target file, or "-" for stdin
  --json                # machine-readable output
  --explain              # show flagged spans + context
  --no-color              # for your soulless CI logs

Use it as a library too

from slopcheck import scorer

result = scorer.score("Text to evaluate")
print(result.score, result.signals)

CI gatekeeper mode

SlopCheck exits with code 1 on high-risk documents, so wire it straight into pre-commit or CI and let Sniffy guard the gate.

- name: Block the slop
  run: slopcheck docs/*.md --no-color

Under the hood

slopcheck/
├── cli.py            → argument parsing & runner
├── scorer.py          → orchestrates all 5 signals
├── render.py           → console + JSON formatting
├── signals/
│   ├── phrases.py        → AI-cliché matcher
│   ├── rhythm.py           → sentence-length variance
│   ├── punctuation.py       → em-dash / colon frequency
│   ├── structure.py          → paragraph uniformity
│   └── lexical.py             → TTR vocabulary scorer
└── data/phrase_bank.json    → the naughty-phrase database

Contributing

Found new slop in the wild? Sniffy accepts submissions. See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT: free as in "delving into the multifaceted world of open source."