slop-gate

Slop Gate

Slop Gate is a Claude Code plugin that adds lifecycle hooks to surface candidate intent drift. When a drift pattern is found, the hook injects an advisory reflection request as additional context on the current event so Claude can see and respond to it without halting. The one exception is PreToolUse, where the hook denies the planned tool call so the gate can prevent drift before it runs. The reflection request states:

• the original task captured from UserPromptSubmit
• the assumption being made
• why that assumption is suspect
• the concrete reflection Claude should do before continuing

The primary detector is intentionally simple: deterministic pattern matching over hook inputs such as stop responses, subagent responses, tool plans and inputs, tool failures, task creation, and task completion. Stop and SubagentStop also include a prompt-based semantic backstop for high-confidence judgment calls about unsupported completion, validation, readiness, or user-as-tester claims. Claude Code hooks do not expose hidden chain-of-thought; Slop Gate only sees the event payloads that Claude Code provides.

Recent Changes

• 2026-05-11 — Top-level marketplace manifest — enables claude plugin marketplace add codeninja/slop-gate from the public repo.

Older entries live under docs/changelog/.

Detecting Intent

Slop Gate will automatially detect your intent as you message and interact with Claude.

To view the current intent, use the slash command:

/slop-gate:intent show

If Intent is not explicitly set, it is inferred.

Declaring Intent

Slop Gate can also detect drift against an explicit, declarative intent for the current task. Run /slop-gate:intent set to declare the goal and the file scope, then Slop Gate will flag attempts to touch paths outside that scope:

/slop-gate:intent set --goal "Add rate limiting to API" \
                     --allowed-scope "src/middleware/**" \
                     --forbidden-scope "db/**"

On PreToolUse for Write/Edit/MultiEdit, Slop Gate checks the target file_path against the declared globs:

• forbidden_touch (deny) — file matches a forbidden-scope glob.
• scope_creep (advise) — allowed-scope is set and the file matches none of the allowed globs.

For Bash, Slop Gate extracts write targets on a best-effort basis from output redirects (> file, >> file), tee, rm, mv, cp, truncate, and sed -i. Complex pipelines and interpreter-as-arg invocations (python script.py out.txt) are not parsed — treat Bash coverage as advisory.

Use /slop-gate:intent show to inspect the current intent and /slop-gate:intent clear to remove it. The intent file is project-scoped, written to <state-dir>/intent.json.

Dismissing False Positives

When a drift pattern produces a false positive, use /slop-gate:dismiss to suppress matching findings without editing or removing the pattern itself:

/slop-gate:dismiss premature_completion --substring "ready for device"
/slop-gate:dismiss forbidden_touch --project --reason "test fixtures"

Dismissals are append-only — they never rewrite the pattern repository, only suppress matches that fit the dismissal record. Each record names a patternId, an optional substring to narrow which match texts are suppressed, and a scope (session by default, --project to persist across sessions). Records live in <state-dir>/dismissals.jsonl. To undo a dismissal, delete its line from the file by hand.

Flagging Missed Drift In-Session

When Claude drifts inside the current conversation and the hook missed it, use /slop-gate:slop to flag the offense, propose a reusable pattern update, and get back on track without leaving the session:

/slop-gate:slop you keep editing the migration files after I told you they're out of scope

The command restates the original intent, names the root cause as an abstract drift shape, and drafts a pattern diff — either a new ## Pattern: <id> section or an ### Extensions block on an existing pattern. Nothing is written until you confirm: answer y to apply, edit to revise the proposal, or skip to keep the correction local without touching the repository. On y, the pattern-curator agent performs the append-only write and npm test runs to confirm the repository still parses. The command then continues the original task with the corrected direction.

/slop-gate:slop operates only on the current conversation. To learn patterns from prior Claude Code session histories, use /slop-gate:audit-history and /slop-gate:ingest-history instead.

Pattern Memory Policy