Thumbgate Brand Voice

---
name: ThumbGate Brand Voice
description: Make any ThumbGate-facing copy — landing/pricing/compare/guide pages, README, postinstall banners, CLI receipts, Reddit/LinkedIn/Bluesky/Threads posts, docs, outreach drafts, blog/launch content — sound like ThumbGate: direct, technical, honest, anti-hype. Use BEFORE writing or editing customer-facing or marketing text, and when the user says "write a landing page", "draft a Reddit/LinkedIn post", "write the README", "make this on-brand", "punch up this copy", or "review this copy for voice". Do NOT use for code comments, commit messages, internal notes, or non-ThumbGate copy — and never to add fabricated traction or unsupported claims (honesty is the brand).
---

# ThumbGate Brand Voice

Orchestrator skill for producing on-brand ThumbGate copy. Method adapted from
the "Claude brand skill" approach (contrast-based learning: show the model a
good line, a line that goes too far, and a line that dies of beige).

## When to use

Use this whenever you are about to write or edit copy a human will read as
ThumbGate: landing/pricing/compare/guide pages, README, postinstall banners,
CLI receipts, social posts (Reddit, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Threads), outreach
drafts, or blog/launch content. Do **not** use it for code comments, commit
messages, or internal notes.

## How to use (in order)

1. Read [`brand-foundation.md`](./brand-foundation.md) — who ThumbGate is, the
   5 personality traits, and the explicit "what we aren't" list.
2. Read [`voice-and-tone.md`](./voice-and-tone.md) — per-trait good / too-far /
   too-flat rewrites. Match the "good" column; never the other two.
3. Read [`content-formats.md`](./content-formats.md) — which traits amplify or
   recede per channel, with on/off-brand examples per channel.
4. Read [`voice_profile.md`](./voice_profile.md) — for specific pacing, tone, and vocabulary guidelines.
5. Read [`body_of_work.md`](./body_of_work.md) — to anchor the core technical thesis and foundational opinions of ThumbGate.
6. Consult [`tokens.json`](./tokens.json) — for color palettes, typography, and styling constraints when generating assets.
7. Draft. Then **stress-test**: reread your draft against the "what we aren't"
   list and the channel rules. If a sentence could appear verbatim on a generic
   "AI governance platform" site, rewrite it until it could only be ThumbGate.

## The one rule that overrides everything

**Never overclaim.** ThumbGate is pre-revenue and honesty is the brand. No
fabricated traction ("trusted by N teams"), no benchmark claims without a cited
source, no "live" integration we don't ship. Honest-and-specific beats
impressive-and-vague every time.