Secondary Text Audit

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 fact test on every keep row and mean it.

2. Uncertainty resolves to delete, with one exception. 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: a wrong keep is permanent noise on the screen.

   The exception is a string carrying a cost, a scope, or a cause. Deleting one of those does not cost a line of copy, it costs the reader the fact that made the screen actionable. When the string tells the user what an action breaks, where a setting stops applying, or why a surface is in a state they did not choose, uncertainty resolves to rewrite. Trim it to the fact and keep it.

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. Fact before verdict. Name which kind of fact the text carries before deciding anything. A string carrying none 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, in the register docs/ui/VOICE.md fixes. If you cannot write one that passes the rules, the verdict was delete.

6. A shorter string is not automatically a better one. Trimming is the means, not the goal. A replacement that reads as a system log has failed even when every word left is load-bearing — check it against VOICE.md before it ships.

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 cost 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 and the voice

Read docs/ui/VOICE.md first — it fixes the register, the person, and what a description must carry, and every rewrite row is written in it. Then read docs/ui/secondary-text.md in full. It carries the scope, the five kinds of fact, the four-question test, and the repo rules. Do not audit from memory of the kind names.

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 difference verdict);
• whether the string is conditional — empty-state only, error-only, first-run only (this decides first-step text 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 test per string

Ask the four questions of every string, in order, stopping at the first failure. Then, for rewrite rows, check that the replacement passes the four questions on its own and obeys VOICE.md.

Step 6 — Verdict-hardening pass

Before emitting, re-examine the table:

• Every keep — name its kind of fact 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 questions as a new string? Does it lead with the fact?
• 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 | Fact | 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, dev-gallery copy — with the
exclusion that applies. Keeps the next reader from re-litigating them.>

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.
• Fact — one of the five kinds, 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

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.
• Own tone or brand voice — docs/ui/VOICE.md does. This skill decides whether a string exists and what it must carry; every replacement it writes must obey that file.
• 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.