jacob-balslev
- 206 skills
- 0 followers
- 1 day ago last updated
- ▌ Inversion · jacob-balslevUse when a goal, plan, design, strategy, or assumption should be examined by reversing it: ask how to guarantee failure, how the opposite could be true, or what would have to happen for the desired outcome not to occur. Covers objective reversal, failure-path enumeration, obstacle-first planning, opposite-hypothesis testing, and prevention design. Do NOT use for decomposing a problem to irreducible premises (use first-principles-thinking), post-failure root-cause analysis (use debugging), recurring failure clustering (use pattern-recognition), or claim/source grounding (use epistemic-grounding). Do NOT use for Break this pricing model down to irreducible assumptions. Do NOT use for This incident already happened; find the root cause. Do NOT use for Score every webhook failure mode with severity, occurrence, and detectability. Do NOT use for Facilitate a team pre-mortem session with independent written generation.
- ▌ Microcopy · jacob-balslevUse when writing or reviewing functional UI text: button labels, empty states, tooltips, dialogs, placeholders, loading/progress messages, toasts, inline validation, permission copy, or onboarding steps. Covers interface-copy patterns such as verb-first action labels, acknowledge-explain-guide empty states, one-sentence tooltips, consequence-first confirmations, progressive loading language, and blur/fix validation messages. Do NOT use for marketing persuasion, documentation prose/guide structure, feedback-state staging, or general linguistic rationale behind wording. Do NOT use for write the marketing headline for the pricing page. Do NOT use for review this WCAG 2.2 contrast violation on the dashboard. Do NOT use for explain the morphology rule behind verb-first function names. Do NOT use for restructure this help-center article into a tutorial. Do NOT use for decide the kebab-case format for this new CSS class. Do NOT use for rename this React component across all call-sites.
- ▌ Semantics · jacob-balslevSemantics: choosing and auditing the meaning encoded by names, status codes, versions, commits, tokens, and signals across code, APIs, and UIs. Do NOT use for Should onboarding be hyphenated, and how does English compound morphology affect that decision? Do NOT use for What casing should a new database timestamp column use -- kebab, snake, or camel? Do NOT use for Rename this function and update every call-site across the repo. Do NOT use for Type the relation between refund and payment as IS-A, PART-OF, causal, or thematic. Do NOT use for Design the full REST resource surface with pagination, idempotency keys, and auth boundaries.
- ▌ Semiotics · jacob-balslevUse when designing or auditing icon systems, colors/badges/shapes, visual metaphors, interface signs, or naming-plus-visual surfaces that users misread. Covers semiotic reasoning across icon/index/symbol, signifier/signified, denotation/connotation/myth, color/shape/position/iconography, affordances, code/API signifiers, and semiotic-coherence audits. Do NOT use for actual UI wording (use `microcopy`), palette/typography craft (use `visual-design-foundations`), accessibility or contrast compliance (use `a11y`), formal class hierarchies, or word morphology rules. Do NOT use for I need formal class hierarchies, axioms, and what-exists rules for our knowledge base. Do NOT use for I need physical database schema design and relationship constraints. Do NOT use for I need the relation type between two concepts — synonymy, polysemy, or meronymy. Do NOT use for draft the exact wording for a button label or tooltip after the sign system is chosen.
- ▌ A11Y · jacob-balslevUse when building or reviewing interactive UI, forms, navigation, or dynamic content. Covers semantic HTML, keyboard access, focus management, labeling, state-change announcement, and reduced-motion / high-contrast preferences. Do NOT use for color-palette creation, visual branding, feedback-state staging, or prose reading-level accessibility - those belong to `visual-design-foundations`, `interaction-feedback`, and documentation respectively. Do NOT use for rewrite this error message at a 6th-grade reading level. Do NOT use for clean up this accessibility code without changing how it behaves.
- ▌ Etsy · jacob-balslevUse when working with Etsy listings — Etsy's own title/tag/category/attribute/description/photo/video model and two-phase search (query matching → ranking on relevancy, listing engagement, recency, shipping price, customer-and-market experience, and personalization); the 13-tag and 20-character-per-tag limits and 140-character title cap; Etsy's 2026 natural-readable-title guidance; the description as an indexed/semantic and Google-snippet surface; free-shipping/shipping-price visibility thresholds; listing-video specs; the first-party Search Visibility diagnostic; the Etsy Open API listing surface; and editing Etsy listings managed by an upstream POD platform (Printify/Printful) including the publish/lock lifecycle, selective publishing, and publish-failure diagnostics. Do NOT use for generic Shopify storefront work, non-Etsy marketplaces, deep keyword-research methodology, the POD product/blueprint/variant model itself, or print-file/artwork generation.