antislop

A blazing-fast, multi-language linter for detecting AI-generated code slop.

Antislop helps you maintain code quality by identifying lazily generated code, deferrals, hedging, and placeholders often left behind by AI coding assistants.

What is Slop?

AI models often produce code that works but is littered with signs of hesitation or incompleteness. Antislop detects:

• Placeholders: TODO, FIXME, HACK, XXX comments
• Deferrals: "for now", "temporary fix", "quick implementation"
• Hedging: "hopefully", "should work", "assumes"
• Stubs: Empty functions or macro stubs like todo!()
• Noise: Redundant comments like // increments i

Philosophy

Antislop is built on First Principles:

1. Code is Liability: Every line of code is a future maintenance cost.
2. Intent != Implementation: Comments like TODO or for now signal a gap between what was intended and what was built.
3. Speed is a Feature: Verification must be instant to be useful.

We believe that AI generated code should be treated with Zero Trust. Verify everything.

Pattern Hygiene (MECE)

We follow a Mutually Exclusive, Collectively Exhaustive strategy with standard linters like MegaLinter.

• Antislop: Detects AI shortcuts (stubs, hallucinated API usage, hedging).
• Standard Linters: Detect syntax errors, style issues, and bugs.
• Rule: If eslint or clippy catches it by default, Antislop will not cover it (unless explicitly whitelisted).

Comparison

Demo

$ antislop src/

  src/main.rs:42:15: CRITICAL [stub]
      ! Empty function body found
      → fn calculate_metrics() { todo!() }

  src/legacy.py:10:5: MEDIUM [deferral]
      ! Deferral phrase detected
      → # for now we just return True

  src/utils.js:5:1: LOW [noise]
      ! Redundant comment
      → // utility function

  ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
  📁 15 scanned, 3 with findings
  ⚠ 3 total findings
  💀 75 sloppy score

  ⚠⚠⚠ High slop detected

Performance

Antislop uses tree-sitter AST parsing for accurate detection. Regex-only mode is ~10x faster.

Scaling:

Benchmarks run on standard laptop hardware (Linux x86_64). Run cargo bench to reproduce.

Installation

From Pre-built Binaries (Recommended)

# via npm (downloads platform-specific binary)
npm install -g antislop

# via cargo-dist (Shell)
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf https://github.com/skew202/antislop/releases/latest/download/antislop-installer.sh | sh

# via Homebrew
brew install skew202/tap/antislop

# via PowerShell
powershell -c "irm https://github.com/skew202/antislop/releases/latest/download/antislop-installer.ps1 | iex"

From Source

cargo install antislop

Usage

# Scan current directory
antislop

# Scan specific paths
antislop src/ tests/

# JSON output (for integration)
antislop --json

# Custom config
antislop -c custom-config.toml

Profiles

Antislop follows a Zero False Positive philosophy for its default core.

• Core (Default): Critical stubs & placeholders only. Zero false positives.
• trict (--profile antislop-strict): Maximum coverage. Detects all forms of slop.
• Standard (--profile antislop-standard): Recommended Baseline. Adds checks for deferrals ("for now"), hedging ("should work"), and dummy data.
• Strict (--profile antislop-strict): Maximum coverage.

# Recommended for most projects
antislop --profile antislop-standard src/

CI/CD Integration

GitHub Actions Example:

jobs:
  antislop:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Install Antislop
        run: curl -sSf https://raw.githubusercontent.com/skew202/antislop/main/install.sh | sh
      - name: Run Scan
        run: antislop --profile antislop-standard .

Installation Options

Antislop is modular. You can optimize for binary size by choosing specific languages:

# Default (Standard Languages)
cargo install antislop

# Minimal (Regex only, no AST)
cargo install antislop --no-default-features --features parallel

# Specific Languages (Tiny binary)
cargo install antislop --no-default-features --features python,rust

# All Languages (inc. C#, PHP, Ruby, Kotlin, etc.)
cargo install antislop --features all-langs

Configuration

Create antislop.toml in your project root to customize patterns:

file_extensions = [".py", ".rs", ".js", ".ts"]

[[patterns]]
regex = "(?i)TODO:"
severity = "medium"
message = "Placeholder comment found"
category = "placeholder"

Language Support

License

Licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)
• MIT license (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in the work by you, as defined in the Apache-2.0 license, shall be dual licensed as above, without any additional terms or conditions.