Stop Shipping AI Slop: Build an Anti-Slop Harness Around Your LLM

"AI slop" is not a model problem. It's an engineering problem you decided not to solve. The slop is the bland, off-voice, half-hallucinated, occasionally-just-an-error-message text that your LLM emits maybe 5% of the time - and that 5% is the part users screenshot. The instinct is to fix it in the prompt: add three sentences of "be concise, be accurate, match my tone." That treats a stochastic system as if it were deterministic. It isn't. You cannot prompt your way to a guarantee.