Your voice

A voice makes the chop sound like you. It is a small JSON file of three lists laid over your profile and presets, so the cleaned text keeps your words, swaps buzzwords for the ones you would pick, and flags the words you never want to see.

The three lists

List	What it does	Maps to
keep	Words and phrases to never flag or cut, so your signatures survive.	allow
prefer	Your own swap, from a word or phrase to the one you want. An empty target drops the word.	wordReplace / phraseReplace
avoid	Your own words to flag wherever they appear.	blockWords

A starter ~/.slop-chop/voice.json:

{
  "keep":   ["ship it", "gnarly"],
  "prefer": { "utilize": "use", "a myriad of": "a bunch of" },
  "avoid":  ["synergy", "circle back"]
}

With this, a preset that would swap a kept word leaves it alone, utilize becomes use instead of whatever a preset picked, and synergy is flagged wherever it shows up.

Where it lives

• The personal default is ~/.slop-chop/voice.json. Once it exists it applies to every run.
• --voice path.json points at a different file for a single run.
• A project's .slop-chop.json still outranks your voice, so a repo can pin its house style.

Precedence, highest to lowest: the project profile, then your voice, then a preset, then the built-in default. Your keep and prefer win over any preset, and a project profile wins over your voice.

On the command line

slop-chop voice init      # write a starter ~/.slop-chop/voice.json
slop-chop voice show      # print the resolved voice and where it came from
slop-chop fix draft.md    # your voice applies with no extra flags

voice init [path] writes somewhere else, and --force overwrites an existing file.

Teach it your voice

The three lists shape the deterministic pass. A fourth, tone, shapes the optional model rewrite: short notes on how you write, sent to the model as "Match this voice" whenever fix --rewrite runs. Write them by hand:

{ "tone": ["short, blunt sentences", "dry humor, no hype"] }

Or derive them from your own writing:

slop-chop voice learn notes.md posts/*.md
cat draft.md | slop-chop voice learn

learn sends the samples to the configured model (the same provider setup as fix --rewrite), gets back a handful of tone notes, and merges them into your voice file without duplicates. Run it again on new samples any time; edit or prune the lines like any other config. The rules pass ignores tone, so scores and deterministic output are unchanged, and the rewrite's fail-closed meaning check still applies.

In the web app

The settings panel has a "Your voice" section with the same three lists, one entry per line. It merges above the presets, the same way the CLI does, and rides along in the share link and the exported profile. Nothing leaves your browser.