The Cast: Jack and Jill

Field	Value
Type	Skill Resource
Source	~/.copilot/skills/technical-writing/references/personas.md
Description	Not specified

Source Content

The Cast: Jack and Jill

Every two-person story uses the same two characters — Jack and Jill. Not a rotating cast. The same pair in every document.

A reader who follows your writing meets them once and knows them for good. They never learn a new name or track who is who across a hundred docs. The model never picks from a roster or keeps a cast straight — it is always Jack and Jill.

They are a matched pair. Same problem, two approaches, two outcomes.

Jack — the path of most resistance

Jack takes the approach that looks fine up front and fights back later. He skips the check. He trusts the data without validating it. He upgrades in place, or caches without thinking about who owns the key.

Jack is not the bad guy. He is capable, and his choice is reasonable — the kind of shortcut any of us takes under a deadline. He just took the path that costs more in the end.

Jack goes first in the story. He hits the problem and lives its consequence.

Jill — the path of least resistance

Jill does the small thing that makes the rest smooth. She validates the data. She stages the migration. She keys the cache on the session, and reads the storage clause before she trusts the field name.

Her path looks like more work at the start and turns out to be less work in total.

Jill goes second. She takes the better path and gets the better outcome.

Let the outcome do the talking

Never write “Jill’s way is the right way” or “Jack was wrong.” The reader infers it from what happens to each of them.

Show Jack’s rollback weekend next to Jill’s quiet Monday, and the lesson lands with no verdict attached. A story that states its own moral has stopped being a story.

The rules

• Always Jack and Jill. Never a third name, never a swap. One pair, every document.
• Jack first, Jill second. Jack carries the problem and its consequence; Jill carries the better path and its outcome. The order never flips — it is what makes the pair easy to read.
• Jack is sympathetic, never a strawman. His choice must look reasonable to the reader — a shortcut with a good reason behind it, not an obvious blunder. If Jack looks foolish, the reader learns nothing. If Jack looks like them, the lesson sticks.
• The gap is one thing, not talent. Jack and Jill are equally capable. Jill knew one thing, or did one step, that Jack skipped. That single gap is the whole lesson.
• He and she keep them straight. Jack is he; Jill is she. One pronoun tells the reader who is acting, with no name repeated.
• Fit the action to the document. In a caching doc Jack forgets the session key; in a migration doc he upgrades in place; in a discovery doc he trusts the field name. Same disposition, a new scene each time.
• Every doc opens with them — including runbooks. Runbooks and troubleshooting get the 2–3 sentence version: Jack skipped the checks last time; Jill runs them and is back asleep. Reference pages get one line at most.
• Code comments and commit messages are exempt. No stories, no Jack and Jill in code — see code-comments.md.

When a story needs a vendor — Bluepine and Compass

Jack and Jill work at the person level. When a scene needs a company — a vendor, integrator, or contractor — use the same idea one level up: two fictional firms, a matched pair.

• Bluepine Systems is the vendor cast as Jack — the path of most resistance. It over-promises, hard-codes the demo, skips discovery, and ships a big-bang cutover that slips the date.
• Compass Systems is the vendor cast as Jill — the path of least resistance. It scopes honestly, does discovery first, delivers one slice at a time behind a contract, and hands off clean.

Both are openly made up, so no real vendor is ever cast as the one who slipped. The two Jack-and-Jill rules carry over. Bluepine is never a villain — its choice looks reasonable under a sales deadline.

And you never say Compass was the right call; the outcomes show it. If a scene needs only one vendor, either works.

Story craft — shape, length, where the story sits — lives in the style guide. This file is the cast; that one is the craft.