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contentVercel

Second Person, Not First

SHOULD

SHOULD: Address the reader as "you" and avoid "we"/"I" in product copy — "your build failed", not "we were unable to complete the build".

Address the reader as "you" and avoid "we" or "I" in product copy

Bad

Good

Why it matters

First-person copy quietly recenters the interface on the company instead of the person trying to finish a task. Second person keeps the subject on the reader — your build, your key, your next step — and usually shortens the sentence, since "we were unable to complete the build" collapses to "your build failed".

References

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.