coder/docs/.style

docs/.style/

Contributor-facing style and content guidance for the Coder documentation. Nothing under this directory is published to coder.com/docs.

What lives here

Path	Purpose
content-guidelines.md	Canonical content rules: what belongs in docs/, what doesn't, why
style-guide/	Canonical prose style guide for docs/
styles/Coder/	Custom Vale rules specific to Coder (product voice, terms)

See content-guidelines.md for the canonical rules on what content belongs in docs/ and what should be routed elsewhere (blog, changelog, Support KB, etc.).

See style-guide/ for the prose style guide. The styles/Coder/ directory holds the custom Vale rules that enforce parts of the guide; Vale's StylesPath in the repo-root .vale.ini points at docs/.style/styles/.

Why a hidden directory

The leading dot mirrors the .github/, .vscode/, and .claude/ convention already used in this repo for tooling-internal directories. The structural Markdown linters and Vale still pick it up (except the style guide's own prose under style-guide/, which is exempt); coder.com's docs site does not. Refer to "What does not run against this directory" below for that exemption.

How exclusion from coder.com works

coder.com/docs routes and search are manifest-driven:

• Route discovery lives in coder/coder.com:src/utils/docs/docs.ts (getDocsStaticPaths). It iterates routes from docs/manifest.json and emits one Next.js static path per entry. Files not in the manifest do not become routes.
• The Algolia surgical indexer at coder/coder.com:src/utils/algoliaDocs/surgical.ts explicitly skips paths that are not in the manifest, incrementing pathsSkipped.

Net result: not adding anything from docs/.style/ to docs/manifest.json gives us no route, no Algolia record, and no sidebar entry. Two defense-in-depth changes in .github/workflows/deploy-docs.yaml keep the deploy workflow from running on .style-only commits and exclude the directory from the surgical-reindex payload on mixed commits.

What still runs against this directory

• make lint/markdown (markdownlint-cli2) processes every Markdown file here. The repo-root package.json invokes markdownlint-cli2 --fix $(find docs -name '*.md').
• make fmt/markdown (markdown-table-formatter) reflows tables here for the same reason.
• Vale (make lint/prose) lints everything here except the style guide's own prose under style-guide/: the landing page, content-guidelines.md, the annotation demo (whose Coder.Demo* rules are meant to fire), and the Coder rule docs. Refer to the repo-root .vale.ini for the active configuration, and to "What does not run against this directory" below for the one exemption.

What does not run against this directory

• linkspector: excluded via excludedDirs in .github/.linkspector.yml. External-link checking is overkill for contributor tooling.
• The deploy-docs workflow: its paths: filter negates docs/.style/**, and the surgical-reindex git-diff invocation excludes the same path. See .github/workflows/deploy-docs.yaml.
• The docs-preview workflow: its paths: filter negates docs/.style/**, so .style-only PRs produce no preview comment. The selection logic also skips .style files when picking the preview target on mixed PRs. See .github/workflows/docs-preview.yaml.
• Vale's Coder rules on the style guide's own prose under docs/.style/style-guide/. The guide deliberately contains the constructs the rules ban, such as Don't examples and banned terms named in headings and prose, so the repo-root .vale.ini clears BasedOnStyles for docs/.style/style-guide/**. Nothing else under docs/.style/ is exempt: the landing page, content-guidelines.md, the annotation demo, and the Coder rule docs are all linted. Zero-baseline is therefore measured over docs/ excluding docs/.style/style-guide/. The exemption applies only when the path resolves to docs/.style/style-guide/... from the working directory, which is what make lint/prose and CI pass (repo-root-relative docs/...). Other invocation forms bypass the glob and still flag the guide's intentional examples: absolute paths (what editors and LSP integrations pass) and subdirectory-relative paths (for example vale .style/style-guide/... run from docs/). Treat those in-editor and subdirectory findings on the guide as expected.

Editing the content guidelines

Open a PR against docs/.style/content-guidelines.md. The rules in that file apply to humans and AI-assisted workflows alike; when it conflicts with another style or contributing doc in the repo, it governs.

Editing the style guide

Open a PR against the appropriate subpage of docs/.style/style-guide/. Follow-up PRs add each rule and the matching style-guide section together.

Adding a Vale rule

Each rule in the repo-root .vale.ini ships clean: zero baseline findings against the current docs/ corpus, excluding docs/.style/style-guide/, which is exempt because the style guide demonstrates the violations the rules ban. The PR that adds a rule is the rule's complete unit:

1. Cleanup commit: fix every existing-content violation of the new rule so make lint/prose reports zero findings for it. The cleanup ships in the same PR as the enable, ordered first.
2. Enable commit: add the rule to .vale.ini at its chosen severity, write a corresponding section under the matching subpage of docs/.style/style-guide/, and add the custom rule YAML under docs/.style/styles/Coder/ if applicable. The rule's message: field points at the relevant style-guide subpage anchor.

Severity is a deliberate per-rule choice:

• error blocks merge. Use for hard policy where any violation is wrong: brand-name casing, first-person pronouns we ban outright, em-dash bans.
• warning surfaces an annotation without failing CI. Use for strong guidance with legitimate human-judgment exceptions: terms that need context (disabled as a technical state vs. ableist usage), judgment-bound style preferences.
• suggestion surfaces a notice annotation. Use for soft guidance where the right fix is contextual: noun-as-adjective patterns like desired state, wordiness, optional sentence reshaping.

The severity choice and the cleanup discipline are independent. A rule landing at warning or suggestion still ships with zero baseline findings; the rule's purpose is to catch new violations, not to surface a backlog of existing ones. A rule that surfaces a standing backlog teaches contributors to ignore the annotation channel, which erodes trust in CI regardless of the severity at which the noise arrives.

PR title: feat(docs/.style): enable <RuleName>.

False-positive policy: one confirmed false positive after enable, either refine the rule or revert. We do not maintain rules that occasionally cry wolf, regardless of severity.

If a policy is judgment-bound (passive voice, weasel words, sentence-case headings on a corpus with many proper nouns), write a Coder-authored rule with the precision the situation needs instead of accepting an imprecise third-party rule at any severity.

This applies equally to Coder-authored rules (under docs/.style/styles/Coder/) and third-party rules from Google, alex, and write-good. Third-party rules are not loaded by default. Each returns through the same per-rule PR pattern after its corpus is clean.