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Modyra

ADR 0124: The public pitch is a single claim set

Status: Accepted

Context

Section titled “Context”

Asked “what is Modyra”, three public surfaces gave three different answers. The README opened with “Define a form once. Run it in every application that needs it.”, the site’s homepage with “Form behavior that does not belong to a framework.”, and the GitHub repository description with “A framework-agnostic, type-safe form engine”. A positioning plan existed, but it lived outside version control — in Italian, and never executed — so it could not hold any surface to account.

The drift was not only verbal. The README quoted a bundle size measured versions earlier (13.4 KB gzipped) while the dated comparison page measured the same surface at 26.3 KB; the brand page on the site showed an indigo (#7067FF) that is not the brand token (#6458EF). Each surface was individually reasonable; together they were a product with no single answer about itself.

Decision

Section titled “Decision”

One canonical claim set, recorded here, is the only source public surfaces draw from.

  • Headline: “One form contract. Every framework. Any backend.”
  • Subhead: “The typed contract between your backend and every frontend form.”
  • Anti-positioning: “Not another form state hook. A form contract.”
  • Agent-era framing: “Forms as data, safe enough for strangers — and agents.” The Dynamic Form Contract’s strict parsing of untrusted input is the property this line rests on; if that property weakens, the line goes.
  • Bundle size is quoted only as measured by npm run test:core-bundle, with the version and date of the measurement, and always beside what the size buys. The number is never rounded down and never hidden.
  • Retired vocabulary: the three headlines above and every claim CONTRIBUTING.md already forbids (“write once run anywhere”, “zero lock-in”, “enterprise-ready”, “production-ready” below 1.0, and the rest of that list).
  • The surfaces in scope are the README, the site homepage and approach page, the GitHub repository metadata, and the homepage field of published packages — which points at the documentation site, not back at the repository.

A public surface that needs to say something not on this list amends this record in the same change, or does not say it.

Consequences

Section titled “Consequences”

Copy is now under the same evidence discipline as code: a headline change is a record change, which is friction a marketing surface does not usually accept. Old taglines survive in history — commits, tags and dated comparison pages keep what they said; only current surfaces are held to this list. The GitHub repository metadata lives outside the repository, so no check in this repo can see it drift; that surface is held by review habit alone. And a claim set recorded in one place can still age badly as a whole — the record centralises the answer, it does not keep it true.

Alternatives rejected

Section titled “Alternatives rejected”

Keep the positioning in the go-to-market plan. That is where the failure came from: the plan is untracked, so nothing public could be checked against it, and nothing was.

Let each surface keep its own headline. The status quo. Three answers to the same question read as three products, and the maintenance cost was paid anyway — in drift, not in coordination.

No record; fix the surfaces once. A one-time alignment without a record is a decision nobody can violate, which the template rightly calls a description. The first new page would have restarted the drift.

Verification

Section titled “Verification”
  • npm run test:docs — links, orphans, sidebar coverage for the pages that carry the claims.
  • npm run test:core-bundle — produces the only bundle figure the surfaces may quote.
  • A grep for the retired headlines across README, site/ and docs/ — any hit outside a dated snapshot is a violation.
  • The GitHub metadata (topics, description, homepage URL) has no in-repo check; it is set once per this record and verified by reading the repository page. That gap is accepted, and stated.

Security and privacy

Section titled “Security and privacy”

None. This record governs what public text says, not what code does. The one adjacent property is that the agent-era framing leans on the contract’s untrusted-input boundary (0007, 0009); if that boundary changes, the claim is reviewed with it.