warn-before-the-thing-you-are-warning-about
A caution placed after the action it concerns arrives after the reader has already decided. Put it above, and make it undismissable when it matters.
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
- writing a download page
- adding a destructive action
- documenting a footgun
- where should this warning go
Avoid and Check are where the value usually is. Do is the section everybody writes.
Trigger
Something a user is about to do has a consequence they will not expect: an unsigned installer their OS will block, a command that rewrites history, a setting that removes a human from a loop, an export that leaves the sandbox.
It does not apply to consequences that are obvious from the label. "Delete" does not need a paragraph explaining that it deletes.
Do
- Put the caution above the control, in the reading order, not below it and not in a tooltip.
- Say what will happen in the user's terms — the exact dialog text they will see, the exact error — and then what to do about it.
- Reserve interruption for the irreversible. A confirmation on a narrowing action trains people to click through the confirmation that matters.
- If the surprise is unavoidable and benign, explain why it happens. "There is no code-signing certificate" converts an alarming dialog into an expected one.
Avoid
Warnings after the button, warnings in a collapsed section, and warnings that a user can dismiss before they have met the situation. All three are the same failure: the information arrives after the decision.
Avoid vagueness that sounds responsible. "Use with caution" tells the reader nothing they can act on, and its real function is to protect the author rather than the user.
Avoid warning about everything. A page where five things are flagged has flagged nothing, and the one genuinely dangerous item is now camouflaged.
Check
Read the page top to bottom as someone who has never seen it, and stop at the moment you would click. Was the caution above that point?
Then check the inverse: count the warnings on the surface. If there is more than one prominent one, decide which is the real one and demote the rest.
Risk
Front-loading cautions makes a page feel heavier and can scare off a user for whom the risk was never real. That cost is genuine and worth paying only where the surprise is genuine.
The failure mode of over-applying this is a product that reads as nervous about itself. If every screen opens with a disclaimer, the disclaimers become chrome and the reader skips them — which puts you back where you started, with worse copy.
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/warn-before-the-thing-you-are-warning-about/SKILL.mdIntegrity
SHA-256 of the file as published. An importer can check that what it received is what this page showed.
7cd3c2d953bf1d3b51901ab66347944751a673072258afb4d9abccb8933f46e7