Prose Standard

Prose Standard

Write enough to preserve the contract, then remove reasoning transcripts, repetition, and decoration. A contract is an obligation, invariant, precondition, postcondition, or compatibility promise that a caller, callee, implementer, producer, or consumer relies on. This skill owns editorial judgment and required prose coverage; it applies to any document or string an agent or human reads — comments, JSDoc, docs, prompts, diagnostics, and visible UI strings.

The defining constraint: a smaller word count is never the goal by itself. The goal is every factual clause preserved, nothing more. Trim or add as the proposition demands.

Preserve the complete proposition

Before editing a passage, enumerate every proposition it carries. Preserve each relevant:

• actor and action;
• condition, timing, and ordering;
• modality — must, may, never;
• negative guarantee and exception;
• ownership, side effect, failure mode, and consequence.

Remove adjectives, repetition, and narration only when every factual clause survives and the result is clearer. A smaller word count alone is not an improvement. Do not weaken a proposition to make progress.

Required coverage by location

This is not a one-way shortening pass — add prose where code and structure do not communicate a required contract.

• Public API docs: document caller-visible return distinctions, throws or rejections, side effects, ownership, timing, cancellation, and durability.
• Internal comments: orient non-local structure and obviously complicated local structure — invariants, race ordering, ownership, security boundaries, surprising failure. Delete control-flow narration and code restatement.
• Module comments: state the module's role, dependencies, responsibilities, and non-obvious architecture choices; link choices to their rationale.
• Tests: explain only non-obvious test design — why a fixture, an assertion, or an indirect observation is necessary. Delete walkthroughs.
• READMEs / package docs: include the consumer contract — configuration, semantics, failures, limitations, extension points.
• Prompts and visible strings: treat wording as behavior; inspect generated output and run behavior validation, or state why no check applies.
• Diagnostics: name the failing subject or path, the violated rule, and the correction when non-obvious. Remove internal execution narration.

Never let an authoring-session vantage leak in

Durable prose states the current state from the repository's vantage — never the authoring session's. A reader at the latest state, with no access to any transcript, PR thread, or uncommitted draft, must be able to resolve every reference and verify every claim. In practice:

• State the present, not the history. Avoid "previously", "now", "no longer", "used to", "renamed", "was moved". State the current mechanism; put change stories in commits and change descriptions, not in durable prose.
• No review or PR vantage. No "a later PR in this stack", "this PR adds", "rejected in review", "the reviewer confirmed". State the shipped mechanism or extension point.
• No reasoning transcript. No step-by-step derivation, proof of obvious branches, test walkthroughs, or rejected local alternatives. Keep the resulting contract or durable rationale; delete the path used to derive it.
• No hedges or planning residue. "Probably fine for now", "should be enough" — promote to a tracked marker or restate as the actual bound; delete the hedge.

Name the exact subject

Write directly: name actors and facts. Before writing a vague abstraction (contract, boundary, shape, surface, gate), ask whether a more exact term names the subject — response fields, JSON validation, ESM exports. Keep a term when it names the exact technical subject. Do not narrate control flow or tests, preserve review history, or restate code.

One home per fact

State a fact in exactly one place; elsewhere, link. The same rationale repeated beside sibling methods keeps one home. Grep a distinctive phrase to find duplicates and replace copies with links.

Workflow

1. Scope the passage. Confirm what is in scope and what the document or string must communicate.
2. Enumerate the propositions before touching anything; keep each relevant clause.
3. Classify each candidate as keep, add, trim, restore, or defer — and apply clear changes only when the task authorizes edits.
4. Check for session-vantage leakage and restate surviving facts from the repository's vantage.
5. Verify the result against the owning code or behavior; confirm no proposition was dropped.

Completion criteria

• Every proposition that matters is preserved; nothing added or dropped.
• The passage states the current state, with no history, review, or reasoning-transcript vantage.
• Every abstraction is checked against a more exact term; the precise subject is named.
• Each fact has one home; duplicates are links.
• Visible strings and prompts are treated as behavior, not decoration.