🪣 Slop-Mop

Slop-mop is a longitudinal force multiplier for humans building with AI. It optimizes repositories toward long-term maintainability and overall throughput in three ways:

• enforcing "no-brainer" SOPs (linting, typing, structure, test coverage, etc.)
• catching bullshit (bogus tests, disabled safety checks, ignored feedback, etc.)
• providing "greased rails" for agents to ride along — protocol-like instruction sequences for both humans and AI that make PR review, comment triage, and remediation fast and thorough

Coding agents optimize for apparent completion — the nearest green checkmark, not the right one. They act like balls rolling downhill, and left to their own momentum they settle in the shallowest local minimum: untested claims, coverage gamed by a true is true, a silenced gate, a git commit --no-verify. The code runs. The PR looks clean. The slop is already in — junk DNA that threatens the code's offspring down the line.

Slop-mop keeps the rule outside the loop. Your standards live in external gates, not inside the agent's reward function, so they hold even when reward pressure is high — and following the rail becomes the shortest path to the reward instead of a wall to climb. Refit carves the initial terrain, swab/scour/buff keep the gradient pointed at maintainable code, and wake-angry-drunk-captain blocks fake progress when only a human can break the tie.

The verbs are deliberately nautical — swab, scour, buff, sail, barnacle. Novel tokens from naval practice don't come with a million training examples of how to weasel around them, which helps keep models out of dangerous eddies.

This is harm reduction, not prevention. A determined model will still find a seam when the reward pressure is high enough; the honest claim is narrower — more catches than misses, over time. That is enough to keep a codebase navigable. It is purposefully opinionated, because structure begets adherence to best practices.

Quick Start

Install it and set up a repo (omit [all] for the framework only — gates whose tools like black, pyright, or pytest are missing will say so):

pipx install slopmop[all]
sm init

Inherited an existing codebase? Run refit first — it builds a remediation plan and walks you gate-by-gate until the repo is clean enough for the daily loop:

sm refit --start
sm refit --iterate
sm refit --finish

Then it's just the loop: sm swab while you work, sm scour before a PR, sm buff after CI or review feedback lands. Not sure what's next? sm sail reads the workflow state and runs the right verb. See The Loop for the full table, or Baselines if you need to defer the cleanup.

Use with Claude

Slop-mop ships as a Claude plugin: a skill that auto-triggers on remediation prompts, plus eight slash commands (/sm-init, /sm-refit, /sm-sail, /sm-swab, /sm-scour, /sm-buff, /sm-barnacle, /sm-wake-angry-drunk-captain). Install once and sm is available in every repo — no per-repo sm agent install required.

In Claude Code or Cowork:

/plugin marketplace add ScienceIsNeato/slop-mop
/plugin install slopmop

Then ask Claude things like "refit this repo", "sail this repo", "swab my changes before I commit", "buff PR 142", or "file a barnacle for this sm friction". The skill activates on remediation language and runs the right verb.