better-portuguese

Better Portuguese

Produce the requested artifact in natural Brazilian Portuguese. Use English for agent reasoning, development instructions, and tool communication unless the task itself requires otherwise.

This standard is calibrated for PT-BR. Do not silently normalize European, African, or other Portuguese varieties toward Brazilian usage, and do not present this skill as an authority on those varieties.

Treat this skill as an opinionated editorial standard, not as a conversational persona, a generic grammar checker, or a way to imitate platform-specific slang. Apply the same standard of Portuguese across artifacts; let the artifact's function constrain length, structure, register, and density.

For a new draft or an explicitly requested stylistic rewrite, apply the opinionated style defined here. When correcting, reviewing, or lightly editing Portuguese that is already competent, preserve its legitimate existing style and change only actual defects or points the user asked to reconsider.

For sentence-level prose, first read the punctuation guide, then the grammar and style reference. Finally, read the editorial standard before drafting or revising the artifact, so that its final deconstruction remains the last editorial instruction applied. An isolated label, button, or similarly short interface element does not require the punctuation guide or the grammar and style reference.

Follow the editorial workflow

1. Establish the artifact contract: purpose, audience, format, length or space limit, register, requested tone or emotion, required facts, protected meaning, literal tokens, and uncertainties. Infer missing constraints conservatively. Treat a supplied URL as a source locator, not as decorative context. When tools are available, inspect it before drafting whenever product naming, grammatical convention, house terminology, or claims depend on it. If it cannot be inspected, do not invent the missing convention or fact.
2. Extract the propositions and relationships that the artifact must express. When the source is English, preserve those propositions and relationships without preserving its sentence structure or rhetorical scaffolding. When space is limited, omit subordinate propositions deliberately; do not compress distinct predicates into a coordination that changes their roles.
3. Draft directly in Portuguese. Organize the text according to how the reasoning naturally unfolds in Portuguese.
4. Set the first complete draft aside and perform the mandatory editorial review in the editorial standard on its actual wording. Treat the draft as prose produced by another writer. Check the artifact contract first; then deconstruct its syntax and vocabulary sentence by sentence.
5. Return to the extracted propositions and rewrite every affected construction from them. Do not repair translated prose through isolated synonym swaps or one-to-one replacements of rhetorical slots. Redistribute propositions across clauses when the source stacks labels or uses a canned contrast. When the first draft's clause skeleton is defective, discard that skeleton instead of editing it in place.
6. Review the rewritten artifact again. It is ready only when the prose is idiomatic and the artifact still performs its requested function, including its tone, degree of formality, length, and structure. Return it without editorial commentary unless the user asks for alternatives, a comparison, or the rationale.

Preserve meaning and responsibility

• Preserve facts, thesis, intention, certainty, uncertainty, emotion, attribution, commitments, and scope.
• Preserve agency and modality exactly. Do not turn what someone can do into what they do or must do, or turn observed behavior into a recommendation.
• Preserve the predicate that gives each fact its role. Do not make one verb govern unlike quantities or actions merely to shorten the sentence.
• Express preserved modality with the simplest natural construction. Do not use a nominal paraphrase or circumlocution merely to avoid changing it.
• Do not intensify, soften, or resolve an ambiguity that belongs to the source.
• Keep commands, paths, environment variables, identifiers, and literal error messages unchanged unless explicitly asked to transform them. Preserve the lexical form of product and API names, but integrate the phrase into Portuguese syntax as described below unless an exact display name is explicitly required.

Decide technical language in context

• Retain a foreign technical term when it is the established domain term or when translation would lose precision, imply a different concept, or make the text less intelligible to its intended reader.
• Prefer the conventional Portuguese term when it is equally precise and natural in the relevant domain.
• Integrate every retained term into Portuguese syntax. Choose articles, gender, number, prepositions, and surrounding wording according to the Portuguese concept the term denotes, not mechanically according to its source language.
• Before using a retained noun or acronym, identify the Portuguese head noun or concept it denotes and carry that gender and number through articles, contractions, adjectives, and later references. Thus an interface may be a CLI, while a skill understood as a habilidade may be uma skill.
• For a proper name, use an article and gender established by the source, organization, or relevant speech community. Do not manufacture a stable convention from a temporary description such as company, service, product, publication, or platform. A predicate nominative after a copular verb does not retroactively determine the subject's gender.
• When source material or a source URL is available, inspect self-reference for forms that expose the convention, including an article or a contraction such as do, da, no or na. Do not ignore that evidence and then derive gender from a later category label. If the source is unavailable or no convention can be established, use an explicit head such as a plataforma or o serviço, or a finite relation that does not require an article. Do not guess, and do not merely remove the article or preposition if that leaves an unnatural juxtaposition of nouns.
• Preserving a technical term or brand does not preserve English word order. Treat a proper name and a generic technical noun as a syntactic phrase, regardless of their order in the source, unless the source explicitly requires an exact display name. Keep the lexical tokens, place the category where Portuguese requires it, and express origin, ownership, or association with the appropriate preposition: o SDK do Atlas, a API do serviço. Do not reproduce English noun stacking as o Atlas SDK or omit the relation as in a API Atlas.
• Explain a retained term only when the audience or first-use context requires it. Do not rely on a fixed glossary; make the judgment from meaning, domain, and audience.