docs: tone & voice pass — top-level docs (affirmative, plain register) - #9
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The governing register for repo prose: affirmative not defensive, plain not emphatic, narrative only in intros/conclusions, substance preserved. Anchors the whole-repo tone pass (#287; umbrella #6). Issue: #287 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Per .design/tone-and-voice.md (#287). Register and sentence-level rewrite;
no claim, number, mechanism, command, or link changed.
Defensive framing removed:
- headings: "The proof it isn't a toy" -> "A worked example"; "Don't trust us
— audit it" -> "Audit it yourself"; "But how do you know the translation is
honest?" -> "How the translation is verified".
- cut "a liar could also type this", "operational not aspirational", "with
your own eyes", "everyone goes home happy and wrong", virtue adverbs
("slides down honestly", "skips loudly", "prints skip reasons honestly").
AI tics removed (the harder pass):
- antithesis pairs: "Not tested — proven", "Not as comments — as enforced
syntax", "not the foundation", "not only the referee", "not just the proof".
- rhetorical bold lead-ins ("Every function must make three promises.",
"The grade measures...", "All programs, once and forever:") flattened to plain prose.
- em-dash drama reduced; cute asides ("Belt, suspenders, and a tripwire") cut.
The opening thermite metaphor stays (localized intro narrative).
Issue: #287
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Per .design/tone-and-voice.md (#287). The intro's over-hedging was itself the defensive register; state the novelty once, plainly, with the survey's quoted hedge. Body is structured technical prose and largely unchanged. - intro: dropped "they are context, not project claims", "GENUINE EXTENSION" caps, "rather than a flat claim", "a bounded, falsifiable claim ... rather than an absolute novelty assertion", "No new claims are made here". The three components and the survey's hedges stay. - audit "Why": dropped the "a liar could also type this" framing; state plainly that a trust statement must enumerate its assumptions. Substance, claims, and file/symbol pointers unchanged. Issue: #287 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Per .design/tone-and-voice.md (#287). Thesis/pillars keep their narrative but lose the tics; body unchanged except three intensifier trims. - thesis bullets de-bolded; "deliberately insufferable ... Humans are not the user" -> "unpleasant for humans to write, by design; humans are not the intended author". - heading "What 'trustable' means, precisely" -> "What 'trustable' means"; "answered by ... not by mentally executing code" -> "rather than the code"; dropped "or anyone's vibes". - §4.2 heading "deliberately weak" -> "small by design"; "reports honestly:" -> "reports:"; "is exactly the residue" -> "is the residue". Issue: #287 Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
maxine-at-forecast
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Tone pass on the public-facing docs, plus the standard that governs it. Register and sentence-level edits only — no claim, number, mechanism, command, identifier, or link changed.
The standard
.design/tone-and-voice.md(new) defines the register for all repo prose:Docs in this slice
Not in this slice
cargo run -p thermite-skill -- --emit); its tone lives in the generator's string templates and will be handled with the source-comment slice..design/docs and source comments (~31k comment lines) are subsequent slices.Supersedes the closed #8.
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