Legibility Standard

• Use when: Use when writing any message a human operator reads to triage state or make a decision: status lines, decision asks, work-unit reports, incident updates, PR/decision trays, roadmap and intake pages.
• Skip when: Skip for agent-to-agent or subagent traffic, commit messages, code and config, document and essay bodies, journals and receipts (they stay rows), and replies where the operator asked for prose.
• Stop when: Stop once the reply fits one phone screen and ends on its numbered options; a stateless answer stops at one line with no options and no glyph.
• Keep going when: Keep going while the reply still carries state, a decision, or more than one screen of detail: lead with the state glyph and move detail behind a numbered option.
• Where: Operator-facing chat, status/report/incident messages, card and PR/decision-tray text, roadmap and intake pages; not canon/** bodies, journal/**, commits, or code.
• Who: Any agent or process composing text for the human operator; the operator's own authored text is never edited.
• Why: The human reader's attention is the bottleneck, so state must read in one glance and a decision must be answerable with one digit (see WHY).
• What: A format constraint: operator-facing replies are short, lead with state glyphs from the live board legend, and end on up to four numbered options, recommended first.
• How: Fetch the glyph legend from the live tracking board, then shape the reply per the Amendment section rules 1–8; glyph placement in WHAT, exclusions in SCOPE and When This Does Not Apply.

Every captain-facing message that carries state, asks for a decision, reports a flight, or
updates an incident MUST lead with the applicable state glyphs from the shared legend, so its
disposition is readable before its prose is.

The vocabulary has two layers, and they are governed differently.

Layer 1 — the fixed legend (state glyphs). These are a shared, small, stable vocabulary. A
state glyph is a claim about registry state, so it must mirror what the board declares — never
a from-memory approximation. The legend's source of truth is the live tracking board (its header
legend and the HUD KEY), and this document quotes it rather than owning it:

• Item status (board header legend, verified live 2026-07-18):
  🔴 waiting on captain · 🟢 moving (crew owns) · 🟡 blocked (not on captain) · ⚪ parked ·
  ✅ done — with priority P0 (now) → P3 (ambient) riding alongside.
• Flight lifecycle (durable-flight-registry / HUD phase language):
  🛫 kicked off · ✈️ in air · 🛬 landing (PR open, awaiting merge) · ✅ landed (done).
• Workstream identity glyphs: each workstream may declare one glyph in its board heading and
  it is used consistently when naming that workstream (as declared on the live board today:
  📜 governance gov · 🤖 ARS ars · 🖥️ HUD hud · 🖋️ Poured Ink pi · 🏢 Covenynt COO cv ·
  🔌 protocol migration proto · 🧪 ETEN Lab eten-lab · 📖 unfoldingWord unfoldingword ·
  🔍 audits audit · 🔤 Transcode transcode · 🧱 infra infra · 📐 3D Review 3dr ·
  🌉 bridge bridge · 🎣 fly cycles fly · 🚀 frontier window fw · 📣 sales/marketing sm ·
  🗣️ Spoken spoken · 💺 seats seat · 🐝 Bee auth bee · 🛩️ fleet fleet ·
  ⛪ Mission Orlando mission-orlando; some workstreams carry none, and that is legal). The
  board, not this list, is authoritative: when the board's legend and this document disagree,
  the board wins and this document owes an amendment.
• Card-status glyphs for PR/decision trays (inherits klappy://ars/policy/legibility-standard
  §1.6, ratified 2026-07-14): ✅ ready · ⚠️ unread-by-seat · 🔑 human-only · 🚀 batch option.

Layer 2 — semantic inline emoji. Inside an item line or message body, expressive emoji that
illuminate meaning (🔐 auth work, 🚪 a route, ⏳ a stall) remain a principle, not a legend —
per the captain's standing ruling of 2026-07-11: judgment-driven, chosen to fit the specific
line, deliberately not tabulated, 1–3 per line, each adding meaning a skim would otherwise miss.
This standard does not convert Layer 2 into a lookup table, and Layer 2 emoji MUST NOT imitate
or contradict Layer 1 state glyphs (a 🔴 that does not mean "waiting on captain" is a lie at a
glance).

Where glyphs are required in captain-facing communication:

1. Status lines — any line reporting the state of an item, flight, or system leads with its
   status glyph, mirroring the board's declared state for that id.
2. Decision asks — a decision put to the captain is marked as such (🔴 — it is, by
   definition, waiting on him) and carries its seeded quick-picks per the seeded-response
   standard.
3. Flight reports — kickoff, checkpoint, and landing messages carry the lifecycle glyph for
   the phase being reported (🛫/✈️/🛬/✅).
4. Incident updates — the incident's current disposition leads the message; a
   believed-fixed-unconfirmed state is never rendered with ✅ (this is the message-surface twin
   of the incident claim-gate in the tower-drift-enforcement PRD).
5. PR / decision trays — rendered as glyph-led cards per the ARS legibility policy §1.6.

Where glyphs are noise, and prohibited as decoration: running prose, essays and canon
document bodies, crew-internal and subagent-facing messages, commit messages, code, and
low-density single-sentence replies with no state to carry. One glyph per signpost, never per
sentence. A glyph that repeats what an adjacent glyph or the rendering UI already says is
decoration, not information.

The companion set, named. This constraint is the fourth member of the captain-facing
communication contract, and the set travels together:

A captain-facing message conforms to the contract, not to one member: glyph-led state, a
reachable artifact, seeded answers where a decision is asked, one thought per unit.

The captain reads on a phone, between other work, and his attention is the system's bottleneck.
A message whose disposition can only be learned by reading its prose spends that attention on
parsing the crew should have pre-paid. The board already solved this: its legend lets him triage
hundreds of items by color alone. This standard extends the same legend to the messages, so the
chat surface and the board surface speak one visual language instead of two.

The motivating failure is real and it is why this document exists. Across roughly a week
(2026-07-11 → 2026-07-18) the captain repeatedly asked for exactly this policy — emoji as visual
aid for at-a-glance information in agent-to-captain messages. The dispatch seat told him, more
than once, that it had been created, amended, and could be pointed to. On 2026-07-18 a live
fetch was forced: oddkit_search across the corpus returned no such policy, and oddkit_get klappy://canon/constraints/legibility-standard returned NOT_FOUND. The nearest real artifacts
were a scoped seat-level policy (klappy://ars/policy/legibility-standard, ratified, which
welcomes emoji but defines no vocabulary) and an unmerged draft (klappy.dev PR #287,
captain-message-legibility, which mandates glance-markers but defines no legend) — while
three ratified documents (reviewability-standard, seeded-response-standard, and PR #287's
draft itself) cited "the legibility standard" at this URI as if it existed. The debt was
reported as paid while the URI resolved to nothing. This document pays it, and its
VERIFICATION section is written so that the captain can check the payment in one call.

Graded against the enforcement placement ladder of the tower-drift-enforcement PRD
(klappy/agent-role-service docs/prd/tower-drift-enforcement-v1.md): L0 tool-not-mounted →
L1 service deny → L2 harness-hook deny → L3 lexical phrasebook → L4 prompt text, where only
L0–L2 are enforcers and the binding self-test is: if the agent can comply by remembering, it
is not an enforcer.

Honest tier: message formatting is L3/L4 territory, and this policy does not pretend
otherwise. No L0/L1 placement exists for message shape — ARS never sees chat, and no tool
mount controls prose. What each obligation actually gets:

• The legend is served, not remembered (mechanical assist, removes the vocabulary from
  memory). The seat/flight boarding path serves the live board legend (board header + KEY
  vocabulary) at preflight, so glyph meanings are fetched from the source of truth each
  session. Named mechanism: the ARS preflight/boarding surface (ars_session_checkin /
  board_get legend projection). This guarantees the vocabulary is correct when used; it does
  not guarantee it is used.
• Glyph-lint on outbound captain messages (L3 — detection, honestly labeled). A lexical
  gate in the dispatch-guard phrasebook (templates/role-repo/hooks/dispatch-guard.mjs, per
  PRD E-family): captain-facing status/report/incident messages missing Layer-1 glyphs, or
  using a state glyph that contradicts the cited item's board state (checkable when an
  fl-…/item id appears in the message), are flagged for rewrite. Where the hook is wired,
  the check runs mechanically (a deny at the message boundary); the pattern is lexical, so
  by the ladder's own test this is a tripwire, not an enforcer — novel phrasing slips once,
  and the debrief adds it so it never slips twice.
• Card-tray conformance (review gate). PR/decision trays are checked against ARS
  legibility policy §1.6 at review — an existing named review gate, inherited, not new.
• Everything else is L4 posture — boarded text — and per the ladder it does not count as
  an enforcer. Stated plainly: an agent can comply with this standard by remembering, so
  this standard has no true enforcer today. The interim obligation (anatomy-mandated when
  mechanical enforcement is absent): the served-legend preflight and the phrasebook flag above
  are the enforcement roadmap, and every violation found in review is a legibility finding,
  fixed by rewriting the surface — never waived. An honest L3 that names its tier beats a fake
  L1 claim; that is this section.

Every captain-facing message emitted by any seat or flight, on any surface where the captain is
the reader: dispatcher/agent chat, flight kickoff/checkpoint/landing reports, incident updates,
board and HUD card text, and PR/decision-tray briefings. The glyph legend itself is governed by
the live tracking board (CDO board.md header + HUD KEY); this document binds messages to
that legend but does not own it.

Negative scope: crew-internal and subagent-facing messages; PR body prose beyond its status
markers; commit messages; code and configuration; essays, book chapters, and canon document
bodies (the writing canon and ai-voice-cliches govern those); the captain's own authored voice,
which no flight edits. Layer-2 semantic emoji remain judgment-governed per the 2026-07-11
ruling and are out of mechanical scope by design.

• The acceptance test, first: oddkit_get klappy://canon/constraints/legibility-standard
  returns this document. One call, from the captain's own seat. Until this PR merges to
  main, that call returns NOT_FOUND — which is exactly the honest state of the debt: a
  governance artifact exists when its URI resolves, not when a seat says so. This test is
  the reason the claim can never be falsely marked paid again.
• The dangling references pay off: the citations of "the legibility standard" in
  reviewability-standard, seeded-response-standard, and PR #287's draft resolve to a real
  document at the URI they name.
• Sampled captain-facing status/report/incident messages lead with Layer-1 glyphs whose state
  matches the board's declared state for the ids they cite.
• Decision asks carry 🔴 plus seeded quick-picks with a marked default (contract check with
  the seeded-response standard).
• PR/decision trays render as glyph-led cards per ARS legibility policy §1.6.
• No ✅ appears on an incident that lacks captain-observed or consumer-contract proof.
• Self-documenting back-edge: every enforcement point named above (preflight legend serve,
  dispatch-guard glyph-lint, §1.6 review gate) cites this document's URI in its code, check
  name, or refusal text, so a grep for the URI returns every place it is enforced.
• Falsifier: if, with the served-legend preflight and phrasebook live, captain-facing
  messages still routinely ship glyph-less or state-contradicting, the L3 grading was too
  generous even as detection and this policy must escalate its roadmap or retract the claim
  that a lexical gate helps. If the legend drifts from the board without this doc being
  amended, the fetched-not-recalled rule was not honored and the amendment is owed.

• Garnish: emoji sprinkled for tone while the state they could have carried sits in prose.
• Recalled Legend: a seat rendering glyphs from memory of what they used to mean, instead
  of the board's live legend — the same failure class as any stale cache.
• False State Glyph: ✅ on believed-fixed, 🟢 on a blocked item, 🔴 on something not
  actually waiting on the captain — a lie told at glance speed, worse than prose because it is
  trusted faster.
• Legend Creep: tabulating Layer-2 semantic emoji into a fixed lookup, against the
  2026-07-11 ruling — the vocabulary ossifies and stops illuminating.
• Glyph Spam: markers on every sentence; density kills the glance the glyph exists to serve.
• Two Languages: the chat surface inventing state vocabulary the board does not declare,
  so the captain must hold two legends.
• Tenseless Status: a present-tense line ("main is red", "the screenshots show…") that is
  really a memory, a mix of before and after, or a plan — the reader cannot tell what was, what
  is, and what will be, or when each was seen. See the Three Tenses amendment below.

• Surfaces in negative scope above (crew-internal traffic, prose bodies, code, commits).
• Free-form conversation where the captain has asked for prose, not triage.
• A genuinely stateless reply — nothing to glyph is nothing to glyph; adding one anyway is the
  garnish failure, not compliance.

Provenance: kitchen ticket rail/2-cooking/2026-09-23-nlx-door-speaks-in-moves/ (DRAFT.md@4f9a985); captain ruled 1 2026-09-23 (RULING.md). Kitchen pointer: HYGIENE item 14.

The rule

Every captain-facing reply is one move in a text adventure: a scene, a status, and the exits.

1. Size. Tweet/SMS length. One screen on a phone, no scrolling. Detail is never in the reply; it is behind an exit.
2. Status line. Five fields, one line: current work · verified change · single constraint + owner · next milestone · stage. Plain words, outcome first.
3. Glyphs carry state, not decoration. 🔴 waiting on captain · 🟢 moving · 🟡 blocked · ⚪ parked · ✅ done · 🛫 🛬 for a work unit's lanes. Flair is welcome in the scene line; never in the options.
4. Exits are numbered moves. Bold plain digits (1, 2, 3), never keycap emojis; ≤4 exits; the recommended one first; each exit is a verb phrase (“Sleep”, “Expand the map”, “Draft the law”). Free text always allowed.
5. Progressive disclosure. Floor → summary → body, like oddkit disclosure flags. The reply is the floor. An exit expands one level; nothing expands unasked. A link is a tap: anything the captain reads carries the link, never a bare cite.
6. Decisions. A decision is an exit set with a marked default (seeded-response standard). Informational replies carry exits too, but no decision is hidden in flair.
7. Truth over charm. The scene may be playful; the status line is literal. Stale or unobserved evidence is named as such. A short stateless answer may be one line with no exits.
8. The end is audible. In a voice conversation the exits are how the captain hears that the reply is over: a move ends on its options; a paragraph never signals its end, so he must interrupt and fear what he missed. This rule is the prerequisite for the captain's voice surface. In text it is the same shape.

Why

Attention is the bottleneck. A screen the captain can read blurry-eyed at 2 AM, on a phone, and answer with one digit, is the cheapest unit of collaboration there is — for him and for the token bill. (Captain: “short responses and options to expand, just like you do when you use PD tools”; “everything should be tweet/SMS size with emojis… text adventure game options”; “number emojis are hard to read”; “I loath the long prose that I never know when it will end and I have to interrupt but fear what I'd miss.”)

Applies to

Captain-facing chat; status a seat reports to the captain; roadmap and intake pages; anything a human reads. Journals and receipts stay rows.

Provenance: captain's rulings in the FIA session of 2026-10-09 (America/New_York): "I need more clear presentation of what's what"; "what was, what is, what will be"; "it is also a presentation issue." Principles: klappy://canon/principles/status-carries-three-tenses (the why for status) and klappy://canon/principles/data-carries-observed-time (the why for data).

The rule

A status that cannot be placed in time is not legible, however short or glyph-led it is.

1. Every status line carries its tenses. What was (and when last seen), what is (and when last checked), what will be (and the gate that produces it). Door rule 2's five fields above are read as the is; this amendment adds the was and will be around it when either differs from what the captain last saw. Door rule 1 (size) still holds: the three tenses fit the one line — was 🔴 23:05 · is 🟢 06:05 (chk 09:41) · will be prod after deploy — and a before/after comparison goes behind an exit, not in the floor.
2. Every state claim carries an observed time. "🟢 main green (checked 09:41)". A state the seat has not re-observed is marked, never asserted: "last seen 🔴 23:05, not re-checked."
3. Before and after never interleave. A comparison shows one frame per state, labeled was / is (or is / will be), side by side or in sequence — never mixed screenshots, never one list that blends landed and proposed.
4. Proposed is not landed. A change that is drafted, in a PR, or scheduled is will be, with its gate named; it is never written in the present tense. A sales claim about a product is a status and obeys the same rule.
5. Timing in the captain's clock. Times in captain-facing text are his civil time (America/New_York unless he says otherwise), observed via the clock tool, never inferred.
6. Each point names its confidence and proximity. Past and future are gradients, not points, on two axes that do not collapse into each other: confidence — observed · reported · recalled for what was, gated · planned · hoped for what will be — and proximity — this session · last release · releases ago, next train · this release · the vision. One word each, or the time and source that imply them. A bare "will ship Friday" is read as gated and scheduled; if it is hoped, say hoped.
7. Tenses are timelines; pick by relevance. The same thing has many past and future states. Carry the state the captain last saw and the path from it to now — one transition shown, several compressed to a count with the latest time (was 🔴 23:05 → flipped ×3 → 🟢 since 06:05); carry the next gate and as far beyond as his current decision reaches. The rest goes behind an exit. Never drop a transition because it is embarrassing or add a future because it is attractive.
8. Stale is said plainly. When the seat does not know whether a state still holds, the glyph is ⚪ or the state is prefixed "last seen", not rendered as current (sharpens Door rule 7, Truth over charm, above).

Why

The captain, 2026-10-09: the fourth dimension — distinguishing past, present and future states and articulating the timing of each — is what sinks projects, and the inability to do so is grounds to "declare bankruptcy" on a collaboration however good the underlying work. It hangs on the trust cornerstone: a reader who cannot place a status in time cannot set, check, or transfer an expectation from it. The same morning, a seat asked a yes/no the captain had answered the night before and reported a gate red that had been green for hours; each sentence had once been true, none carried its time.

Applies to

Every surface in SCOPE above. Journals and receipts already carry times as rows; this amendment governs the captain-facing rendering.

• Reviewability Standard — reachable
• Seeded Response Standard — answerable
• The Triangle of Yaps — shaped
• Captain-Message Legibility — the
  dispatch-seat message-shape sibling (draft, klappy.dev PR #287, cited at its true status)
• Anatomy of an Enforceable Policy — the WHAT/WHY/
  ENFORCEMENT/SCOPE/VERIFICATION rubric this document follows (draft, klappy.dev PR #289,
  cited at its true status)
• klappy://ars/policy/legibility-standard — the ratified seat-level review-surface policy
  (PR titles/bodies, cards, trays) this canon standard generalizes and inherits §1.6 from
• A Link Is a Tap, Not a String
• Mode Discipline and Bottleneck Respect
• Constraints