AddThisFeature

Status Indicator System

Say the same thing about a record's state everywhere that state appears.

moderate Components & Primitives

What it adds

A single vocabulary of states with consistent wording and treatment across lists, detail pages, filters, and exports.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Enumerate every state each record type can be in as the system actually stores it, then map those internal values onto a small set of user-facing states with fixed wording.

  2. 2

    Use that wording everywhere the state surfaces: the list column, the detail header, the filter options, the notification copy, and the exported file. A record that is Paused in the table and Suspended in the export reads as two different problems.

  3. 3

    Handle the states that are not successes or failures — unknown, pending, in progress, expired, and stale — explicitly. These are the ones that get quietly rendered as blank cells.

  4. 4

    Convey each state with text plus shape or icon, never with a coloured dot on its own, and keep the text present even at the smallest density setting.

  5. 5

    Do not surface internal enum values, database codes, or provider-specific strings to users. Map them, and when an unmapped value arrives, show a defined fallback rather than printing the raw code.

Edge cases it handles

7
  • Colour alone cannot carry state. Red and green are indistinguishable for a meaningful share of users, and neither survives greyscale printing or a monochrome display.
  • Unknown, pending, and stale are real states and need their own treatment. Rendering them as an empty cell or defaulting them to the success style misreports the record.
  • The same state must use identical wording in every surface. Divergent labels between a filter and a table make the filter appear broken.
  • Raw internal codes leaking into the interface are unreadable and expose implementation detail; an unrecognised value must fall back to a defined unknown state, and be logged rather than displayed.
  • A state that changes while the user is looking at the record must update in place or be marked as possibly out of date, not silently diverge from the server.
  • The visual container for these states is owned by Badge Component; extend it rather than introducing a second pill shape that sits half a pixel off the first.
  • Filter options must reflect the states that actually occur in the data, so users are not offered a filter that can never match anything.

Definition of done

8
  • Each record type has a documented, closed set of user-facing states.
  • The same state uses identical wording in lists, detail views, filters, and exports.
  • Every state is conveyed by text alongside shape or icon, never colour alone.
  • Unknown, pending, and stale states render explicitly rather than as blanks.
  • No internal enum value or provider code appears in the interface.
  • Unmapped incoming values resolve to a defined fallback state.
  • 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.