A style guide cannot fire

On the 13th of July I shipped a French localisation with 486 tests passing. Every string key was covered in both directions — 303 of 303. The syntax checker was clean. The encoding was verified. Twelve flight-recorder tapes replayed the app's real behavior bit for bit.

It was incredibly bad.

The empty screen greeted returning users with « Il n'y a rien à ajouter » — there is nothing to add — forty pixels above a button marked AJOUTER. A section was headed « Les murs », a literal rendering of the codebase's own internal metaphor, which no French parent has ever said. A countdown rendered « Encore encore 3 min pour contester » because two strings, each perfectly correct in isolation, had been composed into one sentence no person would write. The submit button under the heading « Absence » was labelled « Absence » — and when I checked the English original, it said Away under Away, so the defect predated the translation entirely and every test it ever met was green.

Not one of my 486 checks could see any of this. They were all checking the catalogue — and the catalogue was perfect. The defects existed only on the rendered screen, in place: a sentence next to a button, a heading over a form, a fragment inside a sentence. No string table contains position.

Writing the rules down didn't work either

The obvious move is a style guide: a markdown file of lessons. I wrote one. It was good. It even contained this sentence:

A law with no source is a hypothesis, and is labelled so. Three of the ten are. Source them or delete them; do not let them harden into laws by sitting here.

That sentence was true the day I wrote it, and it would have stayed true — quietly, indefinitely — because prose cannot fire. Nothing reads a style guide back. A checklist is ignored precisely when you need it; a caveat in a document is a caveat with good manners and no hands.

So the laws are data

craft-laws is that file, rebuilt as something that can refuse. Twelve laws of interface and copy, each a node in a tree with rules over it. Each law carries:

• a falsifier — the observation that would convict it, so a verdict can be fail rather than I don't like it;
• a trigger — the property of an app that switches it on ("the app is translated", "a surface has a zero state"), because a law that applies always applies never;
• a citation — publisher, title, URL, and the quote, because a citation without the words is one nobody can check;
• a sighting — a real defect it actually caught, because a law that has never caught anything is a law nobody should trust.

A rule (a-law-cites-a-source) checks the citations. A publish gate refuses to let an uncited law travel as settled. The markdown you read is generated from the data, stamped with the revision it came from, and CI fails if the view and the data disagree — a style guide and its checker can no longer drift apart, because they are the same object.

Three of the twelve are red, and that is the point

Run the repo's own check and it fails:

4 of 37 rule(s) RED.
  no-calque: ...
  untranslatable-tone: ...
  empty-state-never-contradicts: ...
  publish: Red, and correctly so: three of the twelve laws cite nobody.

Three laws — including the one that caught the worst defect of the run, the empty state contradicting the button below it — cite no authority. I looked. I did not find them stated. The old style guide would have let them harden into laws by sitting there; this one carries them visibly red, refuses to publish them as settled, and exits 1 in my face until I find the source or delete the law.

That is what "a caveat that fires" means, and it is the difference between knowledge you wrote down and knowledge you can lean on. If you know where one of the three is stated by someone reputable — I would genuinely like to close the red.

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