Ban the word "legacy" in code comments and commit messages - #1134
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mark-sil wants to merge 1 commit into
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Ban the word "legacy" in code comments and commit messages#1134mark-sil wants to merge 1 commit into
mark-sil wants to merge 1 commit into
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The code-comment standard allowed "legacy X" as a behavioral-parity WHY. Once the code it refers to is deleted, the word names nothing a reader can look up, and they cannot tell whether the behavior is still required. Ban the term in comments and in commit messages, which are both read long after the referent is gone. PR descriptions and review discussion stay exempt: they are read alongside the diff while the context is live, so the team's own word is the clearest one there. State the scope in AGENTS.md, where it is in context regardless of which skill fires, then repeat the relevant half where each artifact is authored -- the two skills for the ban, pr-pitch for the exemption, so a PR body is not written under a rule that does not apply to it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
papeh
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Sep 11, 2026
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LG overall. One change request.
| This covers the assertion messages of new tests too. Commit messages | ||
| follow the same rule (`.claude/skills/commit-messages/SKILL.md`). PR | ||
| descriptions and review discussion are exempt, so do not coin a | ||
| euphemism to avoid the word there. |
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I don't think we want to coin a euphemism anywhere. "PR Descriptions and review discussions are exempt from this rule" should suffice.
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I can remove it, but my preference would be to leave it. Because of the ban in other places, Claude thought it would be best to use the word "classic' instead of "legacy" in a PR I was working on. Telling Claude not to "coin a
euphemism" was Claude's suggestion as a way to prevent it from doing that.
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The code-comment standard allowed "legacy X" as a behavioral-parity WHY. Once the code it refers to is deleted, the word names nothing a reader can look up, and they cannot tell whether the behavior is still required.
Ban the term in comments and in commit messages, which are both read long after the referent is gone. PR descriptions and review discussion stay exempt: they are read alongside the diff while the context is live, so the team's own word is the clearest one there.
State the scope in AGENTS.md, where it is in context regardless of which skill fires, then repeat the relevant half where each artifact is authored -- the two skills for the ban, pr-pitch for the exemption, so a PR body is not written under a rule that does not apply to it.
This change is