A portable skill for AI coding assistants and agentic frameworks (including Google Antigravity, Gemini CLI, Claude Code, and others). It teaches the agent to audit, draft, and rewrite text into plain English, for legal writing and general prose alike.
It applies the core rules of plain-language legal drafting (inspired by Bryan Garner's Legal Writing in Plain English) to turn dense legalese and verbose AI slop into clear, readable prose.
Note
Universal Applicability & Slop Mitigation: The skill guards essential legal terms of art, but its core rules (sentence architecture, active voice, omitting needless words) apply to all professional, technical, and general writing such as business memos, documentation, and correspondence. By enforcing direct, high-density language and banning boilerplate, it also cuts verbose, repetitive AI-generated text ("AI slop").
Legalese Buster: Automatically identifies and replaces archaic terms (aforesaid,hereinafter,said,such) and redundant doublets/triplets (null and void,give, devise, and bequeath).Sentence & S-V-O Optimization: Reconstructs long, winding sentences to place subjects and verbs close together near the beginning, keeping sentence lengths to a readable 20-word average.Nominalization De-bloater: Converts buried verbs (likemake a decisionorconduct an analysis of) back into strong, active verbs (decide,analyze).Deep Issue Framing: Restructures complex legal issues into the clean "premise-premise-question" format (under 75 words) rather than convoluted "Whether" statements.Rule Tabulation: Formats dense multi-part legal rules, conditions, and lists into structured, parallel, and indented sub-items.** Double-Entry Number Clean-up**: Eliminates parenthetical repetition (e.g.,three (3) days->3 daysorthree days).Gender-Neutral Drafting: Replaces binary/clunky pronouns (he or she,his or her) with clean, inclusive, and modern gender-neutral phrasing.Oxford Comma Enforcement: Uses the serial comma to prevent list ambiguity.** Omitting Needless Words**: Strips redundant modifiers (e.g.,completely finish->finish), empty "throat-clearing" introductory phrases, and roundabout sentences to achieve maximum density.ABA Publication Style Compliance: Standardizes restrictive/nonrestrictive clauses (thatvs.which), quotation punctuation, date/name formatting, U.S. abbreviations, and "attorney fees" terminology.Structural Formatting: Redesigns long, dense walls of legal text using informative headings and lists.
This skill uses the portable SKILL.md
(Agent Skills) format, natively supported by Antigravity CLI (Google's successor to Gemini CLI), Claude Code, and Codex CLI. See the framework-specific instructions below.
The fastest path. Works across 20+ agents through the skills.sh registry:
npx skills add fayerman-source/deslop
Antigravity CLI is Google's successor to Gemini CLI (which is being sunset on June 18, 2026) and keeps native Agent Skills. It discovers a SKILL.md
placed in its skills directories; clone the repository into one:
Workspace-specific:
git clone https://github.com/fayerman-source/deslop.git .agents/skills/deslop
Global (all workspaces):
git clone https://github.com/fayerman-source/deslop.git ~/.gemini/skills/deslop
The skill is discovered automatically; restart the CLI or reload skills if it doesn't appear. Antigravity's native install
command is in flux during the transition, so check the official docs for current syntax. The manual clone above works either way.
Legacy: Gemini CLI (until June 18, 2026):Gemini CLI installs the same skill withgemini skills install https://github.com/fayerman-source/deslop.git
(append--scope workspace
for project scope). After that date Gemini CLI remains only for Gemini Code Assist Standard/Enterprise license holders.
Claude Code supports this skill natively through its Agent Skills system. SKILL.md
already carries the required name
/description
frontmatter. Clone the repository into a skills directory:
Personal (all projects):
git clone https://github.com/fayerman-source/deslop.git ~/.claude/skills/deslop
Project-specific:
git clone https://github.com/fayerman-source/deslop.git .claude/skills/deslop
Claude Code auto-discovers the skill and applies it when relevant; you can also invoke it explicitly with /deslop
.
Inside a session:Claude Code has no slash command to install a standalone skill from a URL. Either run the clone above, or ask Claude to do it for you ("clone deslop into~/.claude/skills
"); restart Claude Code afterward so it picks up the new skill.
Alternative (without skills): Append the contents of SKILL.md
to a CLAUDE.md
file: your project-root CLAUDE.md
for a single project, or ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md
for all projects. Claude Code loads both automatically as instructions.
Codex CLI also supports native Agent Skills. It scans .agents/skills/
directories for a SKILL.md
with name
/description
frontmatter (keep the frontmatter; Codex uses it for discovery). Clone into a skills directory:
Project-scoped:
git clone https://github.com/fayerman-source/deslop.git .agents/skills/deslop
User-scoped (all repositories):
git clone https://github.com/fayerman-source/deslop.git ~/.agents/skills/deslop
Invoke it with $deslop
, or let Codex activate it when the task matches the skill description. (Restart Codex if a freshly cloned skill doesn't appear.)
Inside a session:use the built-in$skill-installer
skill: run$skill-installer
and ask it to install deslop from the repository URL (it can pull skills from external repos); browse what's installed with/skills
.
Alternative (always-on): copy the body of SKILL.md
(without the YAML frontmatter) into AGENTS.md
at your repo root, or ~/.codex/AGENTS.md
for global guidance. Codex reads these as standing instructions.
Tools without a skills system can still use these guidelines; load SKILL.md
as the tool's instructions or rules file:
Aider:aider --read SKILL.md
(or addread: SKILL.md
to.aider.conf.yml
).Cursor: copySKILL.md
into.cursor/rules/
.GitHub Copilot: paste the rules into.github/copilot-instructions.md
.
Once installed, your AI agent will automatically detect and apply the skill when you ask it to edit legal documents, or you can invoke it explicitly:
Explicit Prompting:"Review this contract clause using thedeslop
skill.""Draft a brief response to this motion following thedeslop
guidelines." - Slash Commands: If your agent supports slash commands in its TUI, you can trigger it directly:
/deslop Audit this NDA agreement: [paste agreement text]
What you get back: an audit table with one row for each rule section (I–VI), so you can see what the agent checked, not only what it found. Sections with no violations say "none found," and the Section III row lists what the agent kept verbatim. The rewrite follows the table.
In the event that the Party of the Second Part fails to make payment of any sum due hereunder subsequent to the receipt of written notice of default, the Party of the First Part may, at its option, declare this Agreement null and void and of no further force and effect, and may proceed to exercise any and all remedies available to it under the law.
If Jones fails to pay any amount due after receiving a written default notice, Smith may terminate this agreement and pursue any legal remedies.
Contributions are welcome: improve style guidance, expand rules, or add support for more agent frameworks. Open an issue or submit a pull request.
Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE
for more information.