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foolish-bandit teaches Gary to talk like a lawyer's tool, not a developer's

A sweep of the interface swaps debug-speak error and empty-state messages for copy a working lawyer actually understands.

branding

foolish-bandit went through 25 screens of the Gary fork and rewrote the small messages that surface when something fails, loads, or comes up empty. "Failed to save" becomes "Could not save your document. Try again." The same plain-English treatment runs across account settings, project management, document upload, chat, and the review flows.

The empty states get the bigger lift. Where a screen once repeated the feature's own name back at the user, it now explains what to do or what they'll get - a blank reviews page, for instance, tells you Gary will pull parties, dates, key terms, and risks into a table, and the upload picker now tells you to add a PDF or Word file to get started. No underlying logic changed; this is purely how the product speaks to the person using it.

So what Anyone planning to put a Mike fork in front of non-technical legal users should look at this - it's the unglamorous polish that makes software feel finished.

View this fork on GitHub →

Spotted something wrong? Or know the PR text has fresher detail than the writeup above?

Commits in this thread

2 commits from foolish-bandit/gary, oldest first. Source extracted verbatim from the harvested git log.

SHA Subject Author Date
b1a54c40 Merge pull request #7 from foolish-bandit/claude/lawyer-friendly-copy Zack Brenner 2026-05-07 ↗ GitHub 
Make empty/loading/error copy lawyer-friendly
da89931b Make empty/loading/error copy lawyer-friendly Claude 2026-05-07 ↗ GitHub
commit body 
Sweeps the frontend for generic empty, loading, and error strings
and replaces them with action-oriented, lawyer-friendly copy that
explains what to do next. Adds a Try Again CTA to the global error
boundary so users aren't stuck on a dead page.

Highlights:
- Empty states (sidebar, file directory, modals, list pages, project
  detail) now name the next step (upload, create, ask, search by
  client/title) instead of just stating the absence.
- "Processing..." on a freshly uploaded doc → "Reading the document..."
  Upload buttons → "Uploading your document..."
- error.tsx and global-error.tsx now expose Next's reset() handler
  via a Try Again button; copy says Gary hit a problem and offers a
  return-home link.
- not-found.tsx CTA renamed Go home → Return Home.
- Login/signup error messages and progress labels rewritten
  ("Could not sign in. Check your email and password and try again.").
- Account/models alerts ("Failed to save X.") rewritten ("Could not
  save your X. Try again.").
- Tabular review streaming error: "An error occurred. Please try
  again." → "Something went wrong. Try asking again."

No backend changes, no behavior changes, no removed functionality.
Console/log/internal error details are unchanged.

https://claude.ai/code/session_019pRkhcGDRKQWHjzAnV5yCL

Capture this thread into my fork

Download a single Markdown prompt that tells Claude how to port every commit above into your working tree — adapting paths and structure to match your repo. Run it via claude -p < capture-thread-160.md from inside the repo you want the changes in.

⬇ Download capture-thread-160.md