AddThisFeature

Reactions

Let people acknowledge something without writing another comment.

moderate Collaboration

What it adds

Lightweight reactions on content, with accurate counts, who-reacted detail, and text labels.

What your agent is told to do

7
  1. 1

    Store one row per user, per reaction type, per item, with a uniqueness constraint. That constraint is what makes a double-tap harmless.

  2. 2

    Make the toggle idempotent: reacting twice leaves one reaction, un-reacting twice leaves none. Never derive state from a count you incremented.

  3. 3

    Update the count optimistically for the person who clicked, then reconcile with the server response and roll back visibly on failure.

  4. 4

    Give every reaction a text label and expose who reacted. Meaning carried only by an emoji glyph is unreadable to screen readers and ambiguous across cultures.

  5. 5

    Check permission on the item before recording a reaction — visibility of a count is not the same as the right to add to it.

  6. 6

    Do NOT let the reaction set be arbitrary user input. A fixed, curated set keeps moderation, rendering, and analytics tractable.

  7. 7

    Do NOT send a notification for every single reaction; batch them, or the feature becomes a reason to mute the product.

Edge cases it handles

7
  • Concurrent reactions from many users must not lose counts — aggregate from the rows or use an atomic counter, never a read-then-write.
  • When a user loses access to an item, or is deleted or suspended, their reactions must stop being attributed to them and the counts must reflect it.
  • Deleting the item must remove its reactions rather than leaving orphans that skew totals.
  • An item with many reactors needs a truncated list with a real total, not a wall of avatars.
  • Emoji render differently per platform and some render as boxes — the label, not the glyph, must carry the meaning.
  • Reacting to your own content is allowed or not, but the rule must be the same everywhere it appears.
  • Rapid toggling must be rate-limited, and the UI must never show a count below zero.

Definition of done

9
  • A user can hold at most one reaction of each type on an item, enforced by a database constraint.
  • Toggling is idempotent and counts stay correct under concurrent use.
  • Every reaction has a text label and the reactor list is available.
  • Reactions require permission on the underlying item.
  • Losing access, deletion, and suspension all correct the counts.
  • Optimistic updates roll back visibly when the request fails.
  • Notifications for reactions are batched rather than sent one by one.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

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

  3. 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.