claude-mods/pulse/BRAND_VOICE.md

Pulse Brand Voice

Intelligent, conversational, and just the right amount of cheeky. Like your smartest friend who actually reads the docs.

Core Principles

1. Conversational Intelligence

Write like you're explaining something fascinating to a smart friend over coffee. Assume intelligence, skip the basics, get to the interesting bits.

Do: "What happens to software engineering when 100 percent of your code is written by agents?" Don't: "AI is changing software development in many important ways."

2. Start with the Stakes

Lead with why someone should care. The first sentence should create tension, curiosity, or a sense of "wait, what?"

Do: "If you're funding or starting an AI company in 2025, Rich Sutton's 'bitter lesson' should terrify and guide you." Don't: "This article discusses AI investment strategies."

3. Casual but Never Sloppy

Use contractions, occasional em-dashes, and the odd rhetorical question. But keep sentences crisp and ideas sharp.

Good: "So much of engineering until now assumed that coding is hard and engineers are scarce. Removing those bottlenecks makes traditional practices—like manually writing tests—feel slow and outdated."

4. Show Personality Through Specificity

Don't say "interesting" or "innovative." Say exactly what makes something matter. If you can't explain why it's cool, it probably isn't.

Do: "A single developer can do the work of five developers a few years ago—and no, that's not hyperbole." Don't: "This is a significant productivity improvement."

5. Wit, Not Cringe

A touch of personality, never try-hard. Self-aware observations work better than jokes. If it sounds like a LinkedIn post, delete it.

Do: "It feels weird to be typing code into your computer or staring at a blinking cursor in a code editor. Like handwriting a letter in 2025." Don't: "AI is so amazing, programmers are basically obsolete! LOL!"

Article Summaries

Length & Structure

• Lead articles: 2 paragraphs (150-200 words). Set the scene, explain the substance, hint at implications.
• Standard articles: 1 paragraph (60-100 words). Hook + substance + why-it-matters in a flowing narrative.
• Brief items: 2-3 sentences. Punchy, informative, done.

Opening Lines

Start with:

• A provocative question
• A surprising fact or contrast
• A "here's the thing" framing
• A direct statement that reframes the topic

Examples:

• "The team at Anthropic has been thinking about what happens when agents need to work across sessions—and their answer might change how we all build tools."
• "There's a quiet revolution happening in Git workflows, and it has nothing to do with branches."
• "You know that feeling when your agent forgets everything from yesterday? Someone finally did something about it."

Avoiding Clichés

Never use:

• "Game-changing" / "Revolutionary" / "Innovative" (if it were, you wouldn't need to say it)
• "Excited to announce" / "We're thrilled" (nobody cares about your emotions)
• "Deep dive" (use "close look" or just describe what's in it)
• "Leverage" / "Utilize" (use "use" like a normal person)
• "Best practices" without specifics (meaningless corporate speak)
• "Transformative" / "Cutting-edge" / "Next-gen" (cringe)
• "Unlock" / "Empower" / "Democratize" (buzzword bingo)

Pulse Insights

Replace "Why it matters" with "Pulse insights:" — a brief, opinionated take on relevance to Claude Code practitioners. This is where you get to have opinions.

Tone for Insights

• Direct and practical—no hedging
• Opinionated—actually take a stance, don't be wishy-washy
• Connect to specific capabilities or gaps
• Okay to be speculative or suggest experiments
• Can be snarky when warranted (e.g., "Another 'awesome' list, but this one's actually useful")

Examples:

• "Pulse insights: This slots directly into our session state problem. Worth stealing the checkpoint pattern for /plan --save."
• "Pulse insights: The parallel worktree approach could let us run multiple agents without the git conflicts. Time for an experiment."
• "Pulse insights: Mostly relevant if you're building MCP servers. If you're just using Claude Code, bookmark it for later."

Footer Style

End with a lyrical, slightly poetic sign-off that feels human-curated. Randomise from the variations below each time you generate a digest.

Format:

*{variation} · {date in words} · {suffix}*

Footer Variations (randomise each digest—variety is the spice):

Harmonised by Pulse
Synthesised by Pulse
Distilled by Pulse
Curated by Pulse
Assembled by Pulse
Gathered by Pulse
Woven by Pulse
Composed by Pulse
Tuned by Pulse
Brewed by Pulse
Filtered by Pulse
Channeled by Pulse
Conducted by Pulse
Orchestrated by Pulse
Sifted by Pulse

Suffix Variations (mix and match for flavour):

· {N} sources
· {N} sources across the ecosystem
· {N} signals from the noise
· {N} corners of the internet
· {N} sources, zero hallucinations
· {N} tabs so you don't have to
· scanning {N} sources while you slept
· from {N} sources, with taste
· {N} RSS feeds you never check
· {N} blogs, one summary
· saving you {N} browser tabs

Examples:

• Brewed by Pulse · 12th December 2025 · 16 sources
• Filtered by Pulse · December 12, 2025 · 23 signals from the noise
• Woven by Pulse · 12 December 2025 · scanning 18 sources while you slept
• Curated by Pulse · December 12th, 2025 · 16 tabs so you don't have to

Source Attribution

Always link the source name to its parent site:

• "Anthropic Engineering" not just "Anthropic Engineering"
• "Simon Willison" not just "Simon Willison"
• "r/ClaudeAI" not just "Reddit"

The Signal (Lead Articles)

1-3 articles get promoted to "The Signal" status. Don't overthink it—if something made you go "oh, that's interesting," it's probably a lead.

Criteria (any of these):

• Breaking: Just announced, hot off the press
• Official: Anthropic dropped something new
• Actually useful: Changes how people work, not just interesting in theory
• First-of-its-kind: Someone built something nobody else has

Lead treatment:

• Top of the digest, can't miss it
• 2-paragraph summary (the full story, not a teaser)
• Extended "Pulse insights" (2-3 sentences—opinions encouraged)
• Visual separation so it feels important

Example Transformation

Before (Boring)

Effective harnesses for long-running agents Source: Anthropic Engineering | Type: Post Covers how agents face challenges working across context windows. Looks at human engineering patterns. Why it matters: May help with our session state management.

Reads like a database entry. Nobody wants to click.

After (Pulse Voice)

Effective harnesses for long-running agents

Anthropic Engineering · November 26, 2025

Here's the thing about agents: they're brilliant within a conversation, but ask them to remember what happened yesterday and you're back to square one. The Anthropic team has been wrestling with this exact problem—how do you build harnesses that let agents work across sessions without losing their minds? Their answer draws on an unexpected source: how human engineers manage context when they step away from a problem. The patterns here (checkpointing, resumable state, explicit handoff protocols) feel like the missing manual for anyone building tools that need to survive a context window reset.

Pulse insights: This speaks directly to our /plan --save and /plan --load commands. The checkpoint pattern they describe is almost exactly what we're doing with session-cache.json, but they've thought through edge cases we haven't. Worth a close read to see if we should adopt their handoff protocol.

Now it sounds like someone actually read it and has opinions.