Form Field Shell
Wrap every input in one structure so labels, help, and errors behave the same everywhere.
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
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What your agent is told to do
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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Edge cases it handles
7- 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
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Definition of done
8- 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
Help Text Pattern
Help Text Pattern
Put field guidance in one predictable place, phrased the same way every time.
What it does
A consistent treatment for the short explanatory text that sits with a field and its control.
How it works
- 1 Collect the guidance the app currently scatters across placeholders, tooltips, asterisked footnotes, and modal help, and move it into one slot beneath the field.
- 2 Keep guidance that is required to complete the field permanently visible. A format rule hidden behind a hover target is not available to a touch user or a keyboard user.
- 3 Write help as the rule the user needs before typing — the accepted format, the consequence of the choice — not as a restatement of the label.
Copy the prompt
No account needed
Add this feature to my app:
https://addthisfeature.com/x/help-text-pattern
Voice Dictation
Voice Dictation
Put a microphone in text fields so people can speak their input instead of typing it.
What it does
A dictation control on the app's longer text inputs that transcribes speech into the field as the user talks.
How it works
- 1 Add the control to the fields where typing is genuinely tedious: long descriptions, notes, comments, and message bodies. A microphone on a postcode field is clutter.
- 2 Show interim results in the field as they arrive, visually distinct from committed text, so the speaker can see it is working and correct course before they finish.
- 3 Reuse the app's existing Voice Transcription for the server-side path so one recognition configuration and one set of language settings serve both dictation and recorded audio.
Copy the prompt
No account needed
Add this feature to my app:
https://addthisfeature.com/x/voice-dictation
Form Section Pattern
Form Section Pattern
Break long forms into labelled sections people can scan instead of read.
What it does
A section pattern grouping related fields under a heading, a description, and its own actions.
How it works
- 1 Find the forms that have grown past a screenful — settings, profiles, checkout, configuration — and group their fields by the question each group answers, not by the table the columns come from.
- 2 Give each section a heading in the document's heading order and an optional one-line description, so screen reader and keyboard users can jump between sections.
- 3 Allow at most one level of nesting. A section inside a section inside a tab gives the user no orientation and pushes the fields into a narrow gutter.
Copy the prompt
No account needed
Add this feature to my app:
https://addthisfeature.com/x/form-section-pattern
How it works
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Copy the link
Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.
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Give it to your AI
Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.
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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.