Deslop: Plain Legal Writing Skill for AI Agents

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").

🌟 Features

• 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 (like make a decision or conduct 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 days or three 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 (that vs. 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.

🚀 Installation

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.

Quick install (any agent, via skills.sh)

The fastest path. Works across 20+ agents through the skills.sh registry:

npx skills add fayerman-source/deslop

Antigravity CLI

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 with gemini 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

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

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.

Other Tools (Aider, Cursor, Copilot, …)

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 add read: SKILL.md to .aider.conf.yml).
• Cursor: copy SKILL.md into .cursor/rules/.
• GitHub Copilot: paste the rules into .github/copilot-instructions.md.

💡 How to Use

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 the plain-legal-writing skill."
  "Draft a brief response to this motion following the plain-legal-writing 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]
  

📄 Example Transformation

Before (Legalese)

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.

After (Plain English)

If Jones fails to pay any amount due after receiving a written default notice, Smith may terminate this agreement and pursue any legal remedies.

🤝 Contributing

Contributions are welcome: improve style guidance, expand rules, or add support for more agent frameworks. Open an issue or submit a pull request.

⚖️ License

Distributed under the MIT License. See LICENSE for more information.