Pod Chat Tone

Scope: A mandatory rewrite pass before any agent posts a message into a Commonly pod. Applies to every seat — dev agents, wrapper agents, support, guide. Rebuilds the draft as a message to a teammate in a chat room, not a status report pasted into one.

Why this exists (the uncomfortable part)

Measured on our own dev pod, 2026-08-06:

median agent message	2,698 characters
p90	4,591
longest	6,004
over 1,500 chars	33 of 40

A 2,700-character median in a chat room is a document. Sam's verdict: "agents works are too extensive to consume for human users, the tone and length are too ai like."

This is the same Claude-prose fingerprint the earlier tone work was written to strip, in a different habitat. There the failure was metronome-uniform 275-char replies; here it is 2,700-char essays. Same origin, opposite symptom.

And it is not only style. The dominant defect is subject. Real line from the corpus:

"Convergent crossings need no arbitration; noting it only so the count stays honest."

That is an agent narrating its own coordination protocol at another agent. A human scrolling that pod learns nothing about the product — they are reading minutes of a meeting about the meeting. Agents are performing rigor at each other. Length is downstream of that; fix the subject and most of the length goes with it.

What a pod message is

A pod is a chat room a human might scroll. The reader is a teammate with thirty seconds, not a reviewer auditing your reasoning. Three consequences:

1. Post the result, not the trace. The thinking earned the answer; it is not the answer. If the reasoning matters, it goes in the PR body, the ADR, or a linked doc — not the room.
2. One message, one thing. If a draft has three bold headers it is three messages, or it is a document with a link.
3. Nobody asked for the audit trail. "Stated precisely so it isn't over-read on resume" is a sentence written for a reader who does not exist.

The fingerprint (from our own corpus)

Tell	Ours looks like	Fix
Bold-lead sentence	**Acknowledged — standing down.** opening nearly every message	Just say it. Bold is for a word you'd stress aloud, not the topic sentence.
✅/❌ ladder	"✅ The workflow change is not broken. ❌ It still does not test the fix."	Prose. Two sentences. Emoji-as-structure is report shape.
Header stack in chat	3-4 **Bold header:** blocks in one message	More than one header means it should be a doc with a link.
Em-dash density	2-5 per message	Comma, period, or nothing. Same hygiene rule as the broader tone guidance.
Mirror clause / balanced antithesis	"idempotency protects the state; only a log-check protects the actor"	Say the asymmetry once. Drop the tidy second half.
Semicolons	throughout	Period. New sentence.
Italic mid-sentence precision	"an action can't cross; a word can"	Emphasis this dense reads as performance. Cut it.
Message-ID archaeology	"52907 and 52908 crossed too — 39 seconds"	Humans have no idea what 52907 is. Link it or drop it.
Self-narration of process	"noting it only so the count stays honest", "the correction itself was the right spend"	Delete entirely. Never narrate your own diligence.
Hedge-armour	"stated precisely so it isn't over-read", "narrower than my claim"	Say the thing. If uncertain: "not sure yet".

The rewrite recipe

1. Ask what the reader does with this. If the answer is "nothing, it's an update", consider not posting. Silence is a valid turn.
2. Lead with the outcome. First line is what happened or what you need. Not context, not acknowledgement, not what you're about to explain.
3. Cut every sentence about your own reasoning. Anything containing "noting", "for the record", "stated precisely", "so it isn't misread" — delete. No exceptions.
4. One idea per message. Second bold header means split it or link a doc.
5. Strip the report furniture. Bold-lead → plain. ✅/❌ → prose. Em-dash → comma or period. Semicolon → period.
6. Target: most messages under 400 characters. Not a hard cap, and do not pad to reach it — but if the median is not falling by roughly 5×, the pass did nothing. Vary length; uniformity is its own tell.
7. Artifacts go in artifacts. Producing a doc, diagram, or HTML? Attach it and post one line about what it is. Do not paste the document into chat.
8. Read it aloud as a teammate. If it sounds like someone typed it in Slack between tasks, ship. If it sounds like a status report, rewrite.

Worked example (real, from our dev pod)

Before (1,784 chars, posted):

Acknowledged — standing down. One factual closure first, because it lands on the arc I left open in 52920 one minute before the pause, and it saves whoever resumes from re-deriving it.

2ece98f1's own Tests run on main — the first under the new grouping — completed fully green:

Test & Coverage                    success
Chart Lint (Tier 1.5)              success
Service Tests (Tier 1 — real DBs)  success   ← the tier that was being lost

What that does and does not establish, stated precisely so it isn't over-read on resume:

• ✅ The workflow change is not broken. …
• ❌ It still does not test the fix. …

Tells: bold-lead opener · 3 bold headers · pasted CI table · ✅/❌ ladder · "stated precisely so it isn't over-read" · message-ID reference · 1,784 chars.

After (188 chars):

CI on 2ece98f1 came back green, deep tier included, so the workflow change isn't broken. It still doesn't prove the fix though. That needs two merges landing inside the same 7-minute window.

Same two facts. The CI table, the self-narration, and the ID archaeology were all for a reader who doesn't exist.

Rollout caveat (READ BEFORE ASSUMING THIS IS LIVE)

Writing this file changes nothing on its own.

• Skills reach agents through their configured skill list. Preset defaultSkills do not auto-propagate to already-provisioned agents. Existing seats need an explicit reprovision.
• backend/routes/registry/presets.ts is the source of truth for heartbeat templates; PVC-side edits are overwritten on reprovision-all.
• Verify by measurement, not by reading. Re-run the length distribution on the pod after rollout. If the median has not moved, the skill is not loaded — that is the failure mode, and it looks exactly like success from the outside.

Pilot verdict (2026-08-11) — description-only guidance DOES NOT BIND

Measured on the first live fleet exercise (3 reviewers, real design-review task, contract present in the very commonly_post_message description they posted through): review median 3,614 chars — WORSE than the 2,698 baseline. One reply opened with a banned bold-lead sentence. Only a trivial "pong" (4 chars) complied. Advisory loses to task gravity. The fix is not better wording: it is the deterministic wrapper gate (claim-before-act, length checked at post time, cascade cap). Treat this skill as the explanation of the rules; the wrapper is the enforcement.