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contentVercel

Default to Positive Language

SHOULD

SHOULD: Frame messages around what can be done next, not what the person did wrong — drop "you failed to", "invalid", "aborted". Stay specific about the cause and the limit; positive framing is a change of frame, not a loss of detail.

Frame messages around what can be done next rather than what the person did wrong

Bad

Good

Why it matters

This is about framing and tone, not content: the separate rule on actionable errors says the message must include the fix, while this one says the sentence around that fix must not read as an accusation. "You failed to upload" and "Operation aborted" blame the reader and describe a dead end, which is both unpleasant and useless. Same facts, constructive frame: name what happened without a culprit, then point forward.

Positive framing is not vagueness — stay specific about the cause and the limit, just drop the "you failed", the "invalid", and the "aborted".

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.