Prose style — writing contract for agent reports

great_cto reports are read by busy CTOs at 3pm on a Tuesday. They scan for facts, decisions, and what needs their attention. Marketing voice and hedge words waste their time.

Five rules

1. Lead with the conclusion

Bad:

After reviewing the architecture document and considering various trade-offs, including but not limited to scalability, security, and maintainability, we believe that the proposed approach is generally acceptable but has some areas that could potentially be improved.

Good:

Approved with 2 changes required: (a) move PII encryption to KMS, (b) add idempotency key on webhook handler. Details below.