# Anti-patterns

Each of these can compile cleanly and still teach the reader something false.
Rendered pairs: `examples/antipatterns.tex`.

- **A decorative arrow.** The arrow has no data/control/dependency meaning. Remove it or
  make the relationship explicit.
- **A group that is only a visual border.** The outline does not correspond to a real
  module/composite in the paper.
- **One node doing two jobs.** "attention + layer norm + residual" in one block hides the
  mechanism the figure was meant to explain.
- **A new hue for a slightly different view of the same object.** Reuse the role or use
  lightness, not a fresh color family.
- **A caption repeated in the meaning box.** Captions name the objects; the meaning box
  explains what they do and why.
- **Solving crowding by shrinking type.** The type hierarchy is a hard floor. Move the
  stage to another row or split the figure.
- **Magic offsets.** Every hand-tuned coordinate is valid only for the current label. The
  next edit will land a longer label on a neighbor.
- **A floating commentary card between objects.** If it is not an object or edge, it belongs
  in the stage subtitle, meaning box, or one `\sfcallout` beside a finished band.