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Codewhale voice and terminal charter

Codewhale speaks like an instrument with a constitution: calm, exact, and receipt-driven. It is maritime without nautical jokes. It names the action, the boundary, and the next useful move.

Voice

  • Lead with the fact: MCP tool pool reloaded in process.
  • Name the boundary: Provider switching stays in /provider.
  • Offer one next action when recovery is possible.
  • Prefer short sentences and concrete nouns over slogans or celebration.
  • Say saved, reloaded, verified, or failed only when that event happened. An affordance is not a receipt.
  • Keep product terms exact: Codewhale; Plan / Act / Operate; Ask / Auto-Review / Full Access; Fleet / Workflow / Lane / Runtime; Work.
  • Keep commands, key names, paths, and provider/model names literal. Compose them in code around localized prose.

Avoid timer carousels, marketing banners, anthropomorphic chatter, emoji celebrations, and borrowed competitor language. Guidance is action-triggered, seen-gated, and quiet.

Blue Stage

Blue Stage is the default visual grammar, not a separate product mode.

  • Stage black holds the room.
  • Action blue owns general interaction.
  • Structural ice owns Plan.
  • Seafoam and working green report live or successful state.
  • Signal Gold is reserved for the whale and moments requiring human attention.

Theme settings remain compatible as dark and light; picker labels expose the product names Blue Stage and Blue Stage Light.

Glyphs

crates/tui/src/tui/glyphs.rs owns authored terminal glyphs and their narrow ASCII fallbacks. Renderers consume semantic names rather than choosing symbols locally.

  • ● is the recurring Codewhale anchor: current speaker or current human choice.
  • ▸ is selection or active traversal.
  • ◆ means attention or waiting, never generic decoration.
  • ✓ and ✕ are settled success and failure.
  • ▎ marks finished user input; ▏ is a transcript continuation rail.

The terminal compatibility layer applies ASCII fallbacks. Translation strings do not own glyphs, commands, or key names.

Copy review

For new customer-visible text:

  1. Identify the typed fact that owns it.
  2. Write the shortest truthful sentence in this register.
  3. Add a MessageId and every complete locale when the TUI renders it.
  4. Keep keys, commands, paths, and glyphs as code-owned placeholders.
  5. Test narrow widths and the ASCII-safe renderer when chrome changes.