You open a doc a coworker just sent. It’s a wall of text. There are twelve boxes and a title that reads like a poem. And you have no idea why it ended up in your inbox.
This happens to me all the time, and it’s getting worse. Everyone has Claude now, and plenty of people send its raw output straight to their colleagues. So when I saw a post from an AI professional who wrote “I reject Claude slop (with all of my heart),” I laughed and nodded along.
The author also quotes Tobi Lütke, Shopify’s CEO, who has the perfect name for these pages: “slop grenades.” Here’s how the original poster describes one:
A wall of text.
Titles that sound like poetry.
12 boxes, and no idea where to start.
And no clue what I’m looking at, or why I got it.
If you winced reading that, so did I. Maybe you’ve received one of these. If we’re honest, maybe you’ve sent one too.
💣 Two ways to defuse a slop grenade
The creator says there are only two ways to stop slop:
- Never send one.
- Or fix the ones you get.
What I love is that one tool handles both. It’s a single prompt: one page of rules that “unslops” Claude reports. You don’t install anything. You copy it, paste it, and run it on any page, whether you wrote it or someone else dropped it on you.
The whole method rests on one idea, and it’s worth slowing down for.
🎯 The rule underneath everything
According to the expert, every page you send has ONE job for the person who opens it. That job is always one of these:
- Decide: the reader needs to make a call, so the options and a recommendation should come first.
- Catch up: they missed something and need the short version fast.
- Keep checking: they’ll come back to this page, like a status tracker or dashboard.
- Learn: they need to understand something new.
- Say yes: you need their approval, so make the ask easy to find and easy to agree to.
- Use it: it’s a tool, template, or how-to they’ll act on right away.
- Keep it: it’s a reference they’ll save and come back to later.
I think this list explains why slop happens in the first place. Nobody picked a job, so Claude tried to do all seven at once. That’s how you end up with twelve boxes and no clear starting point.
🛠️ How the method works, step by step
From the way the post’s author describes it, the prompt walks Claude through a clear sequence. Here’s each step and why it matters:
- Figure out the reader’s one job. Before any rewriting, Claude decides what the person opening the page needs to do. Every later choice depends on this, so it comes first.
- List the slop out loud. Claude names the problems before fixing anything: the poetic headings, the extra boxes, the missing context. You get to see the diagnosis, which also trains your eye for the next page you write.
- Rebuild the page for the reader. Claude doesn’t just polish the old version. It rebuilds the page around the reader’s job, so a “decide” page leads with the decision and a “catch up” page leads with the summary.
- Cut hard. The creator says about half the words go. Fewer words means less work for the reader and makes the important parts easier to spot.
- Leave good pages alone. If a page already works, Claude keeps its layout and only fixes the small things. I really like this one, because it stops the tool from rewriting everything just to look busy.
Why it matters: a page that does one job gets read and acted on. A page that tries to do everything gets skimmed, ignored, or forwarded with “what is this?”
✍️ Try the idea in your next chat
The full rule page lives in the original post. If you want to test the core idea today, here’s a quick starter prompt I put together from the principles above. It’s my own rough sketch, not the author’s prompt:
“Before you rewrite this page, tell me the ONE job it has for the reader: decide, catch up, keep checking, learn, say yes, use it, or keep it. Then list every piece of slop you see, like vague titles, extra sections, or missing context. Then rebuild the page for that one job and cut about half the words. If the page is already good, keep the layout and fix only small issues.”
Paste it above any report, summary, or update before you hit send. You’ll probably be surprised how much Claude finds to cut.
💡 Tips to get the most out of it
- Run it on your own drafts first. Fixing your own slop is the fastest way to stop sending it.
- Tell Claude who the reader is. “My VP who has two minutes” gives a very different result than “the engineering team.”
- Use it on things people send you. Paste in a messy report and ask Claude to rebuild it for your job, so you can catch up in seconds.
- Read the slop list. Don’t skip the diagnosis. After a week of reading it, you’ll start catching the problems before Claude does.
- Check that nothing important got cut. Cutting half the words is powerful, but you still own the final page. Make sure key numbers and decisions made it through.
🚀 Why this is bigger than one prompt
AI makes writing almost free. That’s great for whoever writes, but it pushes the cost onto whoever reads. Every extra paragraph Claude produces is time someone else has to spend reading it. When a CEO like Tobi Lütke has a nickname for the problem, you know it’s spreading through companies everywhere.
The idea this savvy professional shared flips that. It makes the reader the center of every page again, and it’s simple enough that a whole team can pick it up in an afternoon. To me, that’s what makes it so useful: no new software, no training, just a clear rule and a page you can copy.
Want the full one-page rule set and the complete walkthrough? Check out the original LinkedIn post for all the details.