secondary-text-audit

name

secondary-text-audit

description

Audit the subordinate copy in a UI — section descriptions, field helper text, hints, card subtitles, empty-state body copy, tooltip bodies — against the secondary-text ruleset, and emit a per-string keep/rewrite/delete verdict table a coding agent can apply. Use this skill whenever the user asks to review, tighten, trim, or clean up UI copy, microcopy, descriptions, helper text, subtitles, hints, or empty states; asks "is this copy necessary?", "does this description earn its place?", "why is our UI so wordy?"; wants a settings page or dialog decluttered; or is writing new secondary text and wants it checked before it ships — even if they don't say "audit". For view-level UX behavior (labels, missing states, redundancy, one-primary-action), use ux-semantics-audit; for palette and tokens, use color-audit. This skill owns everything about whether a piece of subordinate copy should exist at all and how it should read.

Secondary-Text Audit

Extract every piece of subordinate copy in a surface and put each one on trial. The ruleset's premise is that secondary text defaults to absent: it exists only to carry information the user needs before acting that the label, the control's shape, and the surrounding context do not already give them. Most shipped secondary text describes what something is, which the label already did. That text goes.

The output is a verdict table, not prose commentary. Every row resolves to keep, rewrite, or delete, and every rewrite carries its replacement string.

Design philosophy (read this — it shapes every judgment call)

1. Delete is the expected majority outcome. This is the inversion that makes the skill useful. An audit that keeps most of what it finds has not applied the ruleset; it has admired the copy. If your table is mostly keep, re-run the category test on every keep row and mean it.
2. Uncertainty resolves to delete. When a string sits between delete and rewrite, choose delete — the primary label almost always suffices. This is the opposite of the precision-over-recall bias in ux-semantics-audit, and deliberately so: there, a false positive makes an agent break working UI; here, the cost of a wrong delete is one line of copy, and the cost of a wrong keep is permanent noise on the screen.
3. Judge the rendered pair, never the key name. A verdict needs the label the user actually sees next to the text. A key called *.description may render as a card subtitle, a tooltip body, a dialog description, or nothing at all.
4. Category before verdict. Name which of the seven categories the text carries before deciding anything. A string you cannot categorize is delete — that is the rule, not a shortcut.
5. A rewrite must be a real string. "Tighten this" is not a replacement. Write the sentence that ships. If you cannot write one that passes the rules, the verdict was delete.

Workflow

Step 1 — Scope the audit

The unit of analysis is the surface: a page, tab, dialog, drawer, or self-contained section. Secondary text is judged against what renders beside it, so the scope must be something the user sees at once.

• Whole package → audit surface by surface; do not emit one 120-row table.
• A named page ("the settings page", "the app detail page") → that page and the dialogs it opens.
• New copy the user just wrote → that string plus its label and siblings.

Step 2 — Extract the candidates

node .claude/skills/secondary-text-audit/scripts/extract-secondary-text.mjs --scope settings

The script collects both carriers Rome uses — i18n locale keys under packages/web/src/i18n/locales/<locale>/ and literal strings in *Description components and description= / subtitle= / hint= / helperText= props — pairs each with its label, resolves it back to the component that renders it, and prescreens it. --scope <substr> filters by key or location; --json emits the rows for programmatic use; --root points at another package.

Its flags are advisory triage, not verdicts:

• forbidden:* and generic-verb are near-certain delete, but confirm the match is real before writing it down.
• no-signal fires on most rows. It means "re-examine", nothing more — real consequence text often has no number.
• sr-only rows are out of scope entirely. Never delete them.
• UNRENDERED means no call site was found. Confirm with a grep for the bare key before calling copy dead, then verdict it delete.
• dynamic-key and key-ref are the weakest resolutions and can over-match: a computed key like connections.headings.${role} matches every sibling under that prefix, including ones the union type never produces. Open the cited line and check the key can really reach this row before trusting it — a row that only resolves this way is a delete candidate hiding behind a wildcard.
• label-inferred means the label shown is a guess from the key path. Read the component before judging that row.

Step 3 — Read the ruleset

Read references/rules.md in full. It carries the scope exclusions, the four authoring tests, the seven categories with their qualifiers, the forbidden patterns, the style rules, the verdict rules, and worked examples — including verified examples from this repo. Do not audit from memory of the category names; the qualifiers are where the wrong verdicts get caught.

Step 4 — Establish the rendered context

For each surface, read the component and write down, before judging anything:

• the label rendered above/beside each string, verbatim;
• the siblings rendered on the same screen (this decides every disambiguation verdict);
• whether the string is conditional — empty-state only, error-only, first-run only (this decides empty-state-guidance and pulls error copy out of scope);
• what the control's shape already says — a toggle, a file input, and a destructive-variant button each carry information the copy need not repeat.

This step is what separates a verdict from a guess. Skipping it produces plausible-sounding tables that are wrong about half the rows.

Step 5 — Run the four tests per string

Delete → category → restatement → placement, in order, stopping at the first failure. Then apply the verdict rules. Then, for keep and rewrite rows, apply the style rules and check that the replacement obeys them.

Step 6 — Verdict-hardening pass

Before emitting, re-examine the table:

• Every keep — name its category out loud. If naming it takes a paragraph of justification, it is rewrite or delete.
• Every rewrite — read the replacement alone, without the original. Does it pass the four tests as a new string? Does it lead with the payload?
• Every delete — confirm the information is not lost: either it was restatement, or the surviving payload moved into another row's replacement. Say which.
• Every row — is the label quoted the one that actually renders?

Step 7 — Emit the report

Use exactly this structure:

# Secondary-Text Audit: <surface>

## Summary
<2-4 sentences: how many strings, the keep/rewrite/delete split, and the single
pattern driving most deletions on this surface.>

## Verdicts

| Location | Label | Secondary text | Category | Verdict | Replacement |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|

## Notes
<Only rows needing a reason a reader would otherwise dispute: a `keep` that
looks like description, a `delete` whose payload moved elsewhere, a `rewrite`
that changes placement. One line each, referencing the location.>

## Out of scope
<Strings the extractor surfaced that the ruleset excludes — sr-only
descriptions, error messages, placeholders,   —  
         >

Column rules:

• Location — file:line of the render site, plus the i18n key when there is one. The applying agent needs both: the key to edit, the line to check.
• Category — one of the seven, or none.
• Verdict — keep, rewrite, or delete.
• Replacement — required for rewrite, empty for delete and keep.

Order rows by render order on the surface, not by verdict. The applying agent walks the file top to bottom, and a reader checking your work walks the screen.

Step 8 — Applying the verdicts

When the user asks for the changes and not just the table:

• A delete on an i18n key removes it from every locale under packages/web/src/i18n/locales/ — en and zh-CN today. A key deleted from en alone leaves the other locale still rendering the string.
• A rewrite updates en and marks the other locales for retranslation; do not hand-translate unless the user asks.
• Deleting the last child of a key object removes the empty parent too.
• Removing a rendered string usually leaves a dead wrapper element — delete the <p> or the description={...} prop, not just the key.
• Verify with pnpm typecheck, then look at the surface in the running dashboard. Copy changes are exactly the class of change a type check cannot catch: a deleted key that is still rendered fails at runtime as a raw key string, not at build time.

Division of labor

Question	Skill
Should this description exist, and how should it read?	secondary-text-audit
Does this view have the right labels, states, and emphasis?	ux-semantics-audit
Is the palette itself sound?	color-audit

The seam with ux-semantics-audit is its consistent-terminology and label-outcome-clarity rules: those judge the label, this skill judges what hangs beneath it. When a description only exists because the label is wrong, say so in Notes and name the ux-semantics-audit follow-up rather than writing a replacement that props up a bad label.

What this skill does NOT do

• Judge labels, button text, or headings — that is the primary layer.
• Judge tone or brand voice — the rules are about information content.
• Rewrite error messages or validation text — different rules, out of scope.
• Translate. It flags locales that need retranslation; it does not write them.
• Apply its own verdicts unless asked. The table is the deliverable.