copy: rewrite site copy to cut repetition and AI-tell phrasing - #92
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ZachLamb wants to merge 1 commit into
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copy: rewrite site copy to cut repetition and AI-tell phrasing#92ZachLamb wants to merge 1 commit into
ZachLamb wants to merge 1 commit into
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Three passes over the English copy: accuracy/structure, then voice, then a
scan for AI-tell vocabulary and sentence shapes.
Pass 1 — structure and accuracy:
- The same positioning sentence ("owns the roadmap, runs the team, and goes
deep on the technical decisions that matter") appeared near-verbatim in the
meta description, the hero tagline, and the About body. A visitor read the
same sentence three times scrolling down. Each now makes a distinct point.
- The meta description ran 236 chars; search engines truncate around 155.
Rewritten to 150.
- "What I Bring" was the one generic, non-thematic section name among Trail
Guide / Trail Log / Gear / Lodge / Credentials. Now "How I Work".
- Service copy leads with specifics instead of abstractions ("409 loose
backlog items into ten projects a team could plan against" rather than
"balancing technical constraints with business outcomes").
Pass 2 — voice: shorter sentences, concrete images, plain verbs. The About
body now describes the actual behavior ("a roadmap review and a code review
on the same afternoon") rather than asserting the trait.
Pass 3 — AI-tell removal:
- Cut "that actually matter", "earns its keep", "reach for", and the
"trail-tested and production-ready" cliche pair.
- Broke up the tricolon habit. Nearly every sentence was a three-item list;
that rhythm is the strongest AI tell in the original copy. Kept one in the
hero where it reads as personality, removed the rest.
- Removed em-dashes from marketing copy (kept in the privacy policy, where
they are ordinary parentheticals in legal prose).
- Scanned all copy against a slop-word list (delve, leverage, robust,
seamless, elevate, harness, showcase, holistic, streamline, foster, ...):
0 hits remaining.
Two tests asserted on the old strings and were updated to match.
273 tests, lint, typecheck, and format:check on changed files all pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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Copy audit of the English site copy, in three passes as requested. Stacked on #91 — based on the security branch so CI is green; the diff reduces to copy-only once #91 merges. Retarget to
mainafter that.Pass 1 — mistakes and structure
The same sentence appeared three times. "…owns the roadmap, runs the team, and goes deep on the technical decisions that matter" was in the meta description, the hero tagline, and the About body, near-verbatim. Scrolling the page you read the same claim three times in a row. Each now makes a distinct point: the hero states the background, About shows what it looks like in practice, the meta description carries the search snippet.
Meta description was 236 chars. Google truncates around 155. Now 150.
"What I Bring" was the one generic, non-thematic section name sitting among Trail Guide / Trail Log / Gear / Lodge / Credentials. Now "How I Work".
Service copy led with abstractions. "Balancing technical constraints with business outcomes" says nothing a competing candidate couldn't also write. Replaced with the specific: "turning 409 loose backlog items into ten projects a team could actually plan against."
Pass 2 — sounding human
Shorter sentences, concrete images, plain verbs. The clearest example is About — it used to assert the trait ("can still go deep on the technical decisions that actually matter"); it now describes the behavior: "I can sit in a roadmap review and a code review on the same afternoon and be useful in both."
Skills went from "The tools and practices I reach for — trail-tested and production-ready" to "The tools I've actually shipped with, not the ones I've read about."
Pass 3 — AI slop removal
Verification
288 tests, lint, typecheck, format:check,
npm audit, andnext buildall pass. Two tests asserted on the old strings and were updated.Two things for you to decide
you@zachlamb.iois a placeholder that ships in production. It's hardcoded inapp/[locale]/privacy/page.tsx:12andcomponents/sections/Contact.tsx:22, and the privacy policy tells EU/UK visitors to email it to exercise their GDPR access/deletion rights. Nobody reading it can actually reach you. I didn't guess a replacement — picking your public-facing address is your call.Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 noreply@anthropic.com
🤖 Generated with Claude Code