docs: rewrite first-person voice to comply with second-person style guide#585
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Per the marketing content guidelines, docs should be written in second
person. Rewrites the three largest offenders (230 of 487 total
first-person pronoun instances):
- system/security.mdx (139 instances): a security/policy page, almost
entirely first-person statements about what Shorebird as a company
does ("we use Google Cloud", "we do not sell your data"). These
can't become "you" statements without changing the facts, so they're
rephrased to third person ("Shorebird uses...") or passive voice
instead.
- code-push/system-architecture.mdx (48 instances): similar pattern -
describes Shorebird's own internal architecture and fork history
("we forked Flutter", "our database"), rephrased the same way.
- code-push/faq.mdx (43 instances): a mix of company statements
(rephrased to third person/passive) and instructional recommendations
("we recommend X" -> "X is recommended" or dropped the pronoun
entirely where the sentence reads fine without it).
Left headings untouched even where they contain "we" (e.g. "What
can't we use Shorebird Code Push for?") since Shorebird.SecondPerson
is scoped to paragraphs only, not headings - these were never flagged
and don't need to change.
This is a partial pass; the remaining ~40 files with first-person
instances will follow in subsequent commits.
…Flutter SDK guides
…ols, fastlane, symbols, release, rollback, update-strategies, architecture-trees, and flutter-version guides
… and getting-started pages
AbhishekDoshi26
approved these changes
Jul 3, 2026
dawn-ducky
reviewed
Jul 6, 2026
Per review feedback, 'we never know anything about your users' reads as a stronger, more direct privacy commitment than the passive third-person phrasing.
…ocs into docs/second-person-voice
tomarra
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Jul 6, 2026
Now that PR #585 rewrote all real first-person prose, the only remaining SecondPerson matches are permanent false positives (i.e., a URL slug, 'US' as a country, the default org name, a quoted heading, and one deliberate first-person privacy pledge). Mask those via TokenIgnores and promote the rule to error severity so it actually blocks CI going forward, matching Shorebird.Headings and Shorebird.Exclamation. Vale.Terms stays at warning severity - its code-fence/URL exclusion bug is unrelated and still unresolved.
tomarra
added a commit
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Jul 7, 2026
* docs: add Vale-based heading sentence-case style check Adds a Shorebird.Headings Vale rule that flags Title Case headings and suggests sentence case, with an exceptions list for brand names, products, and acronyms. Wires it into CI as a PR-diff-scoped, non-blocking check (via errata-ai/vale-action) since most existing headings predate this rule and haven't been migrated yet. Run `npm run lint:style` locally to check docs content. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs: check every heading in CI instead of only PR-changed lines Switches the Vale style-check job to filter_mode: nofilter so it reports every heading violation on each PR, not just newly touched ones. Still non-blocking (fail_on_error: false) since this surfaces the full existing backlog of Title Case headings. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs: codify marketing content guidelines into style checks Adds Vale-based checks for three more of the marketing team's content guidelines, alongside the existing heading sentence-case rule: - Vale.Terms (via a Shorebird Vocab) enforces exact capitalization of "Shorebird", "Flutter", and "Code Push" anywhere in prose, not just headings. - Shorebird.Exclamation flags exclamation points in prose, ignoring code spans/blocks and markdown image syntax. - Shorebird.SecondPerson heuristically flags first-person pronouns (I/we/our/us) in body paragraphs. Scoped to paragraphs rather than headings so it doesn't flag the site's many FAQ-style "Can I...?" headings, which are an intentional convention. Also adds scripts/lint-component-labels.mjs, since Vale (a markdown prose linter) can't see MDX/JSX attributes or isolate component boundaries: it checks <TabItem label="..."> for sentence case and <LinkButton> text for upper case, reusing the same exceptions list as the heading rule. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs: combine cspell, Vale, and component-label checks into one script Renames lint:style to lint:content and adds cspell as a local devDependency so all three content checks (spelling, Vale style rules, and the component-label script) run from a single command instead of requiring cspell to be run separately via CI's reusable workflow. Spelling and style stay on separate engines under the hood (cspell's dictionary is purpose-built for this codebase and shared via VeryGoodOpenSource/very_good_workflows; Vale's built-in speller isn't a good fit) but now share one local entry point. Also fixes a real spell-check CI failure this branch introduced: "vvago" (from the @vvago/vale package name) wasn't in the cspell word list. Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> * docs: add proper nouns discovered while fixing heading casing Adds Stripe, Fastfile, BuildContext, RenderObject, Apple, 1Password, AOT, GuardSquare, LTS, ExportOptions.plist, Skia, and Impeller to the Headings rule's exceptions list. These surfaced while applying the sentence-case fixes in #583 — without them, this check will flag legitimate proper nouns as false positives once both PRs merge. * docs: silence known-permanent Shorebird.Headings exceptions Adds TokenIgnores for headings intentionally left as Title Case in PR #583: - "vs"/"vs." trips Vale's capitalization rule unconditionally, regardless of surrounding case or the exceptions list. - Compound product/brand names (Azure Key Vault, GCP Cloud KMS, App Store Connect, Firebase Remote Config, Launch Darkly, Hot Reload) where per-word exception matching breaks the phrase apart. - Three numbered-list headings kept as Title Case for visual consistency with their siblings (see #583 for why). Without this, these ~9 headings would show as permanent findings forever, even after all the content PRs merge, making it impossible to ever flip this check to blocking. * docs: make Shorebird.Headings and Shorebird.Exclamation blocking Bumps both custom rules from warning to error severity and flips fail_on_error to true in CI, so they now actually gate merges instead of just annotating PRs. Vale.Terms (proper-noun capitalization) is explicitly downgraded to warning via `Vale.Terms = warning`, staying non-blocking. It doesn't respect code-fence exclusion the way our custom scope:text rules do, and a TokenIgnores pattern matching one occurrence of a shell command (e.g. `shorebird release android`) intermittently fails to suppress a second, identical occurrence elsewhere in the same file - confirmed with minimal reproductions, not a config mistake. Findings are still reported, just don't block. Shorebird.SecondPerson stays at warning too, since that guideline's content work hasn't happened yet. IMPORTANT: this branch's own CI will fail until #583 (heading sentence-case fixes) merges - this branch still has the original Title Case headings. Do not merge this PR before #583. Verified the full combination (this branch + main + #583 + #584) passes cleanly with fail_on_error: true. * clean up github action * docs: fix remaining CI failures and scope exceptions correctly Fixes the two Shorebird.Headings failures found when CI ran against the whole repo (not just src/content/docs): - README.md's "# Shorebird Docs" heading - The Framework Search Paths heading in hybrid-apps/ios.mdx, which a review commit deliberately reverted to Title Case as the literal Xcode setting name Also moves Headings-specific exceptions out of .vale.ini's global TokenIgnores and into Headings.yml's own exceptions list, since that scopes them to just the Headings rule instead of blunting every rule for that file. Confirmed the capitalization extension supports exact multi-word phrase exceptions (e.g. "Azure Key Vault"), not just single words. This surfaced two real regressions along the way, both fixed: - Removing "vs" from the global ignore (now scoped correctly) revealed that "Flutter vs. React Native" was never actually resolved - it needed "React Native" recognized as its own proper noun. - Adding common words (Cloud, Reload, Framework) as bare exceptions triggers a bidirectional matching behavior in Vale's capitalization exceptions: it flags any *lowercase* use of that word elsewhere as wrongly-cased, wanting it to match the exception's given casing. Confirmed with minimal repros. Reverted those three to phrase-level exceptions (Framework Search Paths, GCP Cloud KMS) or, for "Flutter Hot Reload" specifically, kept it in .vale.ini's TokenIgnores since even the phrase-level exception collides with ordinary "hot reload" prose used elsewhere and TokenIgnores' literal-text redaction doesn't have this case-insensitive side effect. Verified 0 errors from `vale --config=.vale.ini .` (matching what CI actually scans) after this change. * ci: run component-label lint in style-check job The Shorebird.Headings Vale rule can't see MDX/JSX attributes, so scripts/lint-component-labels.mjs (which checks TabItem/LinkButton label casing) was only ever run locally via `npm run lint:content` and never enforced in CI. * docs: make Shorebird.SecondPerson blocking Now that PR #585 rewrote all real first-person prose, the only remaining SecondPerson matches are permanent false positives (i.e., a URL slug, 'US' as a country, the default org name, a quoted heading, and one deliberate first-person privacy pledge). Mask those via TokenIgnores and promote the rule to error severity so it actually blocks CI going forward, matching Shorebird.Headings and Shorebird.Exclamation. Vale.Terms stays at warning severity - its code-fence/URL exclusion bug is unrelated and still unresolved. * docs: make Vale.Terms blocking by fixing its root causes The Vale.Terms warnings weren't an unfixable tool bug after all. Bisecting the false positives found two real, fixable causes: - A fenced code block immediately following a <CodeTabs> opening tag with no blank line in between gets misparsed and loses its code-fence exclusion, which also corrupts scope/offset tracking for the rest of the file (patch.mdx, staging-patches.mdx x2). Fixed by adding the blank line, matching the existing convention before </CodeTabs>. - faq.mdx used a shorter GitHub issue shorthand ('shorebird#3715') that TokenIgnores' existing 'shorebirdtech/shorebird#\d+' pattern didn't cover. Added a second entry for the short form. With both fixed, the whole docs tree lints with 0 errors and 0 warnings, so Vale.Terms can now run at its default error severity like the other rules, closing the gap that let casing regressions slip through silently. * Update .vale/styles/Shorebird/Exclamation.yml Co-authored-by: Abhishek Doshi <adoshi26.ad@gmail.com> * formatting --------- Co-authored-by: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Co-authored-by: Abhishek Doshi <adoshi26.ad@gmail.com>
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Summary
Shorebird.SecondPersonstyle guideline.Shorebird.SecondPersononly scopes to paragraph text.A handful of
Shorebird.SecondPersonmatches remain and are intentional false positives from the pattern-matching rule, not first-person prose:security.mdx— URL slug#can-i-use-shorebird-in-my-countrysystem-architecture.mdx— "US" (United States), matched as the pronoun "us"faq.mdx— link text[How We Bill]quoting an actual page headinghybrid-apps/ios.mdx,hybrid-apps/android.mdx,release.mdx,security.mdx— "i.e." matched as the pronoun "i"account/orgs.mdx— the literal default org name "My Organization"Test plan
npm run buildsucceeds with no broken linksvale(with the not-yet-merged tooling from docs: add style checks for headings and content guidelines #576) shows 0 realShorebird.SecondPersonfindings acrosssrc/content/docs(only the documented false positives above remain)prettier --checkandcspellpass on every changed file