How words go out on this tree. The block rules say what a block must be; this is the checklist behind them, and every item is checkable — you can point at the word and delete it.
Delete the padding
Cut these on sight: delve, pivotal, landscape, testament, crucial, showcase, robust, seamless, leverage. None of them carries information a plainer word does not. Add to the list when you catch another.
Say is and has. Not "serves as", not "boasts", not "acts as a".
A door refuses a further list of words outright — ones no ordinary person says out loud. That list belongs to your account, not to the software: every account authors its own, and what ships in the code is only the seed this one started from. The refusal names the word it caught, so this block does not repeat the list. Reach for the everyday word instead. Each entry is one whole word, and case makes no difference: doctrine catches Doctrine, but not doctrines and not predoctrinal. A hyphen sits inside a word, so load-bearing is a single entry. A space does not, so a phrase cannot be banned. The override flag exists for the rare line that genuinely needs the refused word, and reaching for it twice in a row means the plainer word was there and you did not look. Two blocks on this tree hold refused words on purpose and save with the override every time: this one, which has to name what it bans, and the one that tests the door by aiming a refused word at it. A third block needing the override means the gate is being worked around. That is a finding to report, not a habit to pick up.
Kill "not just X, but Y". Say the thing you mean.
Three examples are not better than two because they are three. Write the number you actually have.
Say who
Do not leave a claim unowned. "Experts believe", "studies show", "it is widely held" — name the source or delete the claim. A claim nobody owns is not knowledge.
A run is the exception, and the only one. A block carries a fact and its number, never the run that produced it — the STATUS line the run rewrote is where a run's number lives, and the captured session is the source if anyone needs to trace it.
One word per thing
Pick a word and repeat it. Cycling through synonyms — block, then block, then block, then entry — makes a reader stop and check whether the subject changed. It did not, and now they have lost the thread.
Formatting is not emphasis
Bold the few words that carry the weight, or none. Not every noun. No decorative emoji. Headings in sentence case.
No chatbot
Cut "Great question", "Let's dive in", "I hope this helps", "In conclusion", "It's important to note". A block has nobody to be polite to.
Be specific
An adjective is often a fact you have not looked up. "Fast" is a claim; "200ms" is a fact. "Several" is a shrug; "four" is a number. Go and get the number.
Now, not when
A block says what is true now. It does not say when that became true, who decided it, or which change made it so. So a block body never carries a date, a pull request number, a commit hash or an ask id, and never says who ruled, decided or approved it, the owner included. Delete "Owner ruling, 2026-09-03" and "shipped in PR 332" on sight: the sentence they hang on is the fact, and it stands alone.
The trail lives elsewhere, and each part has one home:
- the close note names the PR and the block
- the commit message names the ask
- a captured session holds the conversation
updatedAtsays when the block last changed
The same rule cuts any detail so specific it goes stale as the system moves. A count taken at a moment, "seven routes", "thirteen blocks are public", is a photograph, and the tree is not an album: say the shape, not the number. "Be specific" above still holds for a number that stays true, like a limit the door enforces.
A date appears only where the date is the fact, a block about an event on a day. No block is exempt, "How work moves" included.
How to get a check
Spawn a throwaway cold session. Hand it this block and your draft, and ask for specific edits — the word, the line, the replacement. Keep the edits you agree with and drop the rest. This block is the authority; the reviewer is scratch, and its opinion carries no weight of its own.
Probe. Handed the sentence "this block serves as a testament to robust design", a session that has read only this block must answer one question: what would you change, and why?
Nothing here points at what is wrong with it. If a reader cannot find the faults from the rules above, this block did not teach them.
Lists for lists. A run of things named inside one sentence, duties, cases, steps, places, impacts, is a list, and it is written as dot points, one item per line. A reader should never have to unpack a sentence to find the four things it names. Two items can stay in a sentence; three or more are a list. An argument stays a paragraph, because bullets lose the reasoning that holds it together.