Form Field Shell

Wrap every input in one structure so labels, help, and errors behave the same everywhere.

involved Forms & Input

What it adds

A single wrapper owning the label, description, error, and status region around any control in the app.

What your agent is told to do

1
Inventory the app's existing fields and find the variations that have accumulated — label above versus beside, error under versus in a tooltip — then route all of them through one shell.
2
Generate a stable identifier per field and use it to link the control to its label, its description, and its error, so the association survives re-renders and does not collide when the same field appears twice on a page.
3
Support required, optional, read-only, and disabled as declared states of the shell, and let the shell pass them to the control rather than each screen setting them by hand.
4
Accept custom controls — comboboxes, date pickers, rich text, file drops — not only native inputs, by letting the shell hand its identifiers to whatever renders inside it.
5
Do not have the shell announce the error and also leave the control announcing its own. One error, one announcement; duplicated messages make a screen reader read the same sentence twice.

Edge cases it handles

Identifiers must be stable across renders and unique across the page — a field repeated inside a repeating group must not point two controls at one label.
Required, optional, read-only, and disabled are four different things and must be visually and programmatically distinct; a read-only field is still readable and copyable, a disabled one is not.
An error announced by both the shell's live region and the control's own validation message is read twice; decide which one speaks and silence the other.
A custom control that renders no native input still needs the label association, the error link, and a focusable element, or the shell will describe something the user cannot reach.
Help text and error text must both be linked to the control, and when an error appears the description must not be dropped from the association — the user still needs the format rule.
A field whose label is visually hidden by design still requires an accessible name; no field may rely on placeholder text as its label.
The wording, placement, and conditional behaviour of the description are owned by Help Text Pattern, and the required marker is owned by Required Field Indicator — this shell owns the slots and the wiring, not the copy.

Definition of done

Every input in the app renders inside the same shell.
Each control is programmatically linked to its label, its description, and its error.
Required, optional, read-only, and disabled render distinctly and are exposed to assistive technology.
Custom controls use the shell with the same associations as native inputs.
An error is announced exactly once.
Repeating a field within a page produces no duplicate identifiers.
The feature matches the existing design system.
No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

Unit Converter

Voice Dictation

Code Editor Field

How it works

1

Copy the link

Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.
2

Give it to your AI

Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.
3

It inspects, then implements

Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.