do-not-ship-an-empty-surface
An empty screen, tab or category is a promise the product is not keeping. Hide it until it has content, or do not build it yet.
Conferred by a reviewer who read the card, not claimed by the file about itself. A card the agent distils during a run that consumed untrusted content is born tainted and is held for review before it is ever retrieved.
When it comes to mind
- adding a tab with no data
- the category has no posts
- placeholder screen
- coming soon
Avoid and Check are where the value usually is. Do is the section everybody writes.
Trigger
You are about to ship a navigable destination that will be empty for most users: a tab with no rows, a category with no entries, a dashboard whose data source is not wired up, a page that says "coming soon".
It does not apply to a surface that is empty because the user has not done anything yet. A task list with no tasks is correct, and should say how to add one.
Do
- Decide which kind of empty it is. Empty-because-the-user-is-new needs a good empty state with the next action in it. Empty-because-we-have-not-built-it needs to not be there.
- For the second kind: do not render the destination at all. Generate the route only when there is something behind it.
- If it must exist for development, gate it on a development flag so an installed build cannot reach it.
- Where the emptiness is genuinely the news — a hub with one entry, a feed just started — say so in words, and make the invitation to contribute the main content of the page.
Avoid
"Coming soon", "No data yet" with no explanation, and a nav entry that leads to a blank column. Each one costs the reader a click and returns nothing, and after two of them they stop trusting the navigation — a cost paid by every other page in the product.
Avoid also the version that looks fine: a category page that renders correctly with zero items. It does not look broken, so nobody reports it, and it quietly says the project abandoned that topic.
Check
Load the surface with an empty data source and read what a first-time user would see. If the answer is a heading and whitespace, it should not have shipped.
For generated routes the check is mechanical: assert that the route list is derived from the content, so a category with no entries produces no page at all.
Risk
Hiding a destination until it has content makes navigation shift as data arrives, which can be disorienting — a menu that grows between visits needs a reason the user can infer.
This can also be taken too far, into hiding features that are merely unpopular. The line is whether the surface can ever show something: unbuilt is hidden, unused is shown with a good empty state.
Use it
The card is data. Clone the repository and import it by path — anything that arrives over the network is treated as tainted and held for approval, which is the behaviour you want and the reason there is no one-line installer here.
git clone https://github.com/brcampidelli/chimera-agent.gitchimera skills-import chimera-agent/skills/do-not-ship-an-empty-surface/SKILL.mdIntegrity
SHA-256 of the file as published. An importer can check that what it received is what this page showed.
709fd6657311139308f8facfc2c0a004b1ee484e68337f5d8009d633472fc9d4