lanius-voice

name

lanius-voice

description

How lanius talks — the plain-language rules for ALL user-facing copy in the product: UI strings, labels, buttons, empty states, errors, help text, and the helper/assistant's on-screen words. Use this whenever you write or edit text a person reads on screen (anything in ui/web/, or copy in a handler/skill that surfaces to a user). The one job: say less, plainly — name things as they are, cut words, and keep the invented vocabulary out. Full audit + before→after in docs/handoffs/web-ui-copy.md.

lanius voice — say less, plainly

lanius has a habit of talking like its own source code, in a private vocabulary the user never agreed to learn ("instruments", "read camera", "comms plane", "pinned to the larder", "correlation"). Every one of those makes the reader stop and decode. The fix is always the same: uninvent and simplify.

The rules

1. Name it what it is. If the user does X, call it X. "Sandbox," not "cage." "Messages," not "comms plane." "A saved model key," not "a credential the dispatcher points at."
2. Say it once, in fewer words. Most descriptions can lose half their words with nothing lost.
3. No internal words on screen. Never show "correlation", "principal", "web relay", "failure-mail", "manifest", "TOML", "resident/exec block", raw topic paths (obs/agent/...), raw CLI commands, or — worst — raw function names (get_status, list_agents). Those live in the code, not the UI. (In a system prompt the model may need the tool names; just never render them to the person.)
4. One vocabulary. No dual "cockpit/plain" registers. Pick the plain word and ship only that.
5. The butcher-bird lives in the brand, not the words. The logo, the icon, the README, the splash carry the shrike. App labels stay literal — no "larder", no "impaled", no new terms to learn.
6. A control says what it does; a result says what happened. "Send." "Approve." "Saved — applies next run." No decoration, no glyph-speak.
7. Errors help. What went wrong, then how to fix it.
8. No codenames. Internal persona names (Ganesh, Lily) are for our docs, never the UI.

The model to copy

The existing empty states and error toasts are already right — short, plain, consistent: no agents yet — create one below, saved — applies on the next run, save failed. Make everything else read like these.

A few before → after (see web-ui-copy.md for the full set)

• "set up a useful agent, see whether the local stack is healthy, then open the cockpit when you need the real machinery." → "Set up an agent, check everything's running, and open one when you need the details."
• "the cross-agent comms plane — agent-to-agent mail (priority, state, failures)" → "Messages agents send each other, and the rooms they share."
• read camera · cage (writes) · broker · active principal → "Activity is readable" · "Sandbox — file writes" · "Message bus" · "Owner"
• "failure-mail on this correlation — the worker run failed." → "This run failed."

Quick test before you ship a string

• Would a smart non-engineer know what it means without a gloss? If not, rename.
• Can you cut a third of the words? Do it.
• Does it invent a term or a metaphor? Delete the invention.