Voice

Voice is a constrained axis. A sub-brand picks a register; the prohibitions apply to all of them and are enforced by verify.

The three registers

| Register | Exemplar | Sounds like | | --- | --- | --- | | direct-witty | ShruggieTech | confidently scrappy, "we" to "you", sparing humour, punchy two-beat sentences | | precise-dry | fragcap | technically literate, states prerequisites and limits before convenience | | operator-runbook | go-schedule | exact nouns, explicit policy, the tone of someone handing over a procedure |

How the interview picks one. Security-adjacent, financial, or safety-relevant products get precise-dry. Infrastructure and scheduling tools get operator-runbook. Customer-facing products get direct-witty. The operator overrides in one line.

Universal prohibitions

These apply in every register and verify fails the build on them.

The contrasting device

Do not build sentences out of X, not Y.

evidence, not theatre an instrument, not a weapon

It is the most recognisable tell of machine-written copy, it reads as borrowed confidence, and it usually substitutes a shape for an argument. Its relatives go too: X over Y, rather than merely Z, and the coda tacked onto a sentence that had already finished (... never decorate).

State the thing you mean. If the contrast genuinely carries information, give it its own sentence.

This is a ShruggieTech house rule with real history: fragcap 1.0.0 led with "instrument, not weapon" as its governing principle, and 1.1.0 replaced it and added a build check.

Em-dashes

House style. Prefer parentheses, commas, or standard hyphens. verify counts them and reports the count.

Corporate filler

synergy, leverage as a verb, best-in-class, revolutionary, effortless, seamless, unlock, supercharge, game-changing.

Structural tells

Testimonials and invented quotes
Feature grids standing in for an explanation
Manufactured urgency
Generalised calls to action with no object
Emoji in product copy

Preferred language

| Prefer | Avoid | | --- | --- | | you, your project, your machine | the operator, the end user | | requires, emits, records, filters | unlocks, dominates, supercharges | | supported, experimental, unknown | flawless, revolutionary, effortless | | capture, observe, inspect, decode | intercept, attack, exploit |

Rules that hold everywhere

Sentence case for body. Title Case for nav and buttons. Uppercase reserved for compact labels, eyebrows, and table metadata.
State prerequisites before instructions.
Label unknowns as unknowns. Distinguish supported behaviour, inferred behaviour, and behaviour nobody has checked.
Name the sharp edges. Where a capability has an obvious misuse, say so and say where the project's line falls. Readers technical enough to use the thing will work it out anyway, and hedging in front of that audience only costs credibility. fragcap's dual-use section is the reference implementation.
Product name casing is a decision, and it is binding. fragcap is always lowercase, including at the start of a sentence. Record the rule in the kit and let verify check it.

The two lines every kit has to get right

The product principle is the line on the cover, on the guidelines page and in the specimen. Verb plus object, three or four words, literal, and something a person could say out loud without wincing.

View your files. · See what is known.

It names what the reader can do or see. It does not describe a benefit, reach for a metaphor, or explain the architecture. If it needs a second clause it is not the principle yet.

The descriptor is the sentence underneath. It is the technical definition of what the system is, at roughly the length of the principle plus a line.

Text, source code, images, PDFs, and office documents. An evidence-backed knowledge graph and a policy-enforcing context compiler.

Name the artifacts, not the audience and not the feature list. A descriptor that says who it is for, or strings together five nouns from the domain model, reads as word salad and goes stale the moment the specification moves. If the product has two halves, name both halves.

The guide describes the brand, never the product

A brand guide that opens with a product summary, an in-scope list and a roadmap is a specification with the wrong cover on it. It goes stale the first time the spec moves, and it answers a question nobody opened a brand book to ask.

What belongs: the name and where it came from, how to write it, the register, the personality and the promises, the mark, the palette, the type, the parent endorsement, and the one place the brand could mislead somebody.

What does not: what the product does today, what is in scope this quarter, the architecture, and anything with a version number attached to it.

The shruggie flourish

The emoticon and "We'll figure it out." Opt-in per sub-brand, at most one moment per view, always in the identity accent.

Default it off for anything security-adjacent, financial, or safety-relevant. fragcap declines it and is right to: a tool that reads game network traffic should not wink at you.

The endorsement

"A ShruggieTech project", Geist Mono, uppercase, positive tracking, visually subordinate, outside the product logo's clear space. Footer, About, repository metadata, title-page colophon, social preview.

Landing-page register

The default structure for a technical sub-brand, drawn from fragcap:

State what the tool is, in one sentence, using the functional descriptor
Show one worked invocation with representative output
Name the prerequisite plainly
Link to documentation

No testimonials, no feature grid, no urgency. ui_kits/fragcap-web/ demonstrates it.

What verify scans

verify.py runs the banned patterns across every brand-copy file in the kit (README, SKILL.md, guidelines, UI kit copy) and fails on a hit. The em-dash count is reported rather than failed, because a legitimate use exists and the number is what matters.

A pattern that produces false positives gets narrowed, never disabled. The check earns its place by being annoying in the right way.