One real draft, start to finish, including what was wrong with it

What a prospect found here, and what it changed

On 1 September 2026 a prospect evaluating PoCify read this page, clicked through to the professional services page two of the quotes come from, and found that it is a catalogue of consulting packages Cockroach Labs sells. "Get a comprehensive operational performance assessment" is the blurb for a package called Health Check. "Optimize your CockroachDB workloads" is the blurb for one called Performance & Optimization. The "your" in both means their customer. We had filed both as that company's operational pain, while listing the same two packages under their core offerings further down this page. Both buying triggers are the same mistake against their homepage. Four for four.

Checking that a quote exists never asked whether the sentence was about the company, so a keyword hunt over any vendor's site found the brochure every time. The product now runs a second gate before an operator sees anything, and it rejects six things: a quote that opens on an imperative, one that addresses the reader as "you" outside a careers page, one that restates something we already listed as one of their offerings, one whose benefit goes to somebody they sell to ("we help engineering teams...", "trusted by 2,000 teams"), one that claims what their product is or does with nothing in it they could be held to, and one that refers to nobody at all, which is a thesis about their market rather than a fact about them. Below is that gate, the shipped code, run over these same four quotes.

On 3 September 2026 the same prospect compiled this gate out of the repository and ran seven ordinary vendor sentences through it. Five were accepted as evidence about the company. The worst of them was the second quote on this page with one word moved: we reject "Achieve high cost efficiency and consolidate databases on a modern PostgreSQL platform" and we accepted "CockroachDB delivers high cost efficiency and database consolidation on a modern PostgreSQL platform". Same sentence, same brochure, opposite verdict, because the first three rules checked grammar: they caught the imperative and the second person, so the identical claim in the declarative or the first person walked straight through. The two rules added above ask who the sentence benefits and whether it claims anything checkable, so the mood no longer decides. On 8 September 2026 the same prospect came back and broke it from both sides at once: the sixth rule was reading the company name at the head of a sentence off a list of the verbs a company may take, so "Figma froze hiring across its infrastructure org" was thrown away and told it held no name, while "Confluent sets data in motion" was kept. A list of verbs can never cover English. The gate now separates the two by tense instead, because something that happened to a company is in the past and the brochure is in the timeless present, and a present-tense sentence still survives if it carries an unhedged count or names somebody else you could ask. What the gate still cannot do: it reads sentences, not meaning. A present-tense fact about a company that names nobody and counts nothing reads to it as brochure and is thrown away, and a sentence can always be true of them and useless to you, which is why the quote and the link are there so you can be the one who checks. On 9 September 2026 they broke the same rule from the other side: it still assumed a company is followed immediately by its verb, so "Vanta, like many of its peers, paused hiring" and "Zapier in the spring lost its head of infrastructure" were thrown away and told they held no name, which is a claim you can disprove by reading the first word. A subject and its verb are now allowed a phrase between them, fenced by commas or headed by a preposition. Two things that costs, both in the cheap direction: a sentence opening on an abstract noun rather than a company ("Migration in the enterprise is slow") is now read as naming somebody, and a brochure line whose verb is hidden behind a phrase ("Fastly at the edge serves content faster than anyone else") can get past the tense rule, because locating a verb behind a phrase needs a dictionary this gate does not have. Both let a positioning line through rather than delete a real signal, which is the direction we would rather be wrong in.