Naming Convention

naming-convention — filenames that carry the work

A filename is the only metadata that survives every tool: Finder, an upload dialog, a Slack drop, a folder someone opens in six months. When a batch ships as ad-v5-hook-01.mp4 … ad-v5-hook-21.mp4, the person receiving it has to open all 21 to do anything, and the numbers mean nothing a week later.

The job of this skill is that someone can pick the right file without opening it.

The rule

The filename carries every axis that varies across the batch, plus a stable sort key.

Anything constant across the batch belongs in the folder name, not in 40 filenames. Anything that varies and is not in the name is a thing the user has to open files to discover.

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<index>-<subject>-<descriptor>-<treatment>.<ext>

• index — zero-padded, first, so disk order matches whatever ordering the review used (canvas cards, a shot list, the order they were cut). This is worth a lot: "card 7" on the review page and the 7th file in the folder should be the same thing.
• subject — what the thing is about. The product, the client, the topic.
• descriptor — the axis that distinguishes near-duplicates: style, format, angle, take.
• treatment — what was done to it: body-edited / body-unedited, captioned / clean, 9x16 / 1x1, draft / approved.

Worked example, from a hook A/B batch:

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hook-07-lookalike-cinematic-body-unedited.mp4
hook-07-lookalike-cinematic-body-edited.mp4
     │  │          │         └ treatment: which body cut (captioned vs clean)
     │  │          └ descriptor: the ad style
     │  └ subject: the product being advertised
     └ index: matches card 7 on the review canvas

Two files, same hook, and you can tell them apart in a Finder list without a preview.

Spell the axis out when a bare word is ambiguous. …-unedited.mp4 reads as though the hook is unedited; …-body-unedited.mp4 cannot be misread. Length is cheap; a wrong reading is not.

Verify the facts before you bake them into 40 files

This is the part that actually costs time when skipped.

Labels inherited from an upstream step are evidence, not truth. A cut list, a shot list, a client spreadsheet, an earlier session's JSON — each was written by someone solving a different problem, and mislabels survive because nothing downstream ever checks them.

Two real examples from one batch of 21, both wrong in the upstream cut list:

• A hook titled "sparkling water" was actually an ad for a cap. The generation had two references: a reference image (the cap — the product) and a reference video (a sparkling-water ad — the style). The upstream title had named the style reference.
• A hook titled "Gut Check" was actually the Thumb-Stopper protein bar. Gut Check was a different hook's product, one slot away.

Both would have shipped into four filenames and a review canvas.

How to check cheaply, in order:

1. Find where the source states it. In generated-ad work the tool's own prompt panel shows the prompt and a legible reference-image thumbnail a few seconds into most clips — that settles it outright. The equivalent elsewhere: a slate, a title card, a project file, an order form.
2. Look at the artifact itself. Pull frames from where the subject is on screen. Be aware this is the harder path for close-up product work: extreme close-ups crop wordmarks, and picture-in-picture bubbles cover them. Four escalating crops of one bar wrapper still only read "THUMB…"; the prompt panel gave the full name in one frame.
3. Cross-check the transcript. Someone usually says the product name out loud.

Spend the ten minutes. Renaming is cheap; a wrong product name on a client deliverable is not, and neither is the credibility hit when they spot it.

When you do correct an inherited label, say so explicitly in the handover — the user may have that wrong label in their own notes, and a silent fix reads as an inconsistency later.

Slug rules

Keep names shell-safe, URL-safe, and sortable:

• lowercase, hyphen-separated, ASCII; no spaces, apostrophes, &, or parentheses
• zero-pad indexes (07, not 7) so lexical sort matches numeric sort
• prefer the name a human would say ("hyperfocus", "gut-check") over an internal code
• keep the subject slug stable across batches — same product, same slug, so a later ls *lookalike* finds every one
• resist stuffing: if the name needs four descriptors you probably have two batches, and the extra axis belongs in the folder

Keep the map as data

Put the per-item facts in a small JSON file next to the batch, not inside a rename script:

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{"_note": "read off the tool's prompt panel, NOT the upstream cut list — two of those were wrong",
 "items": {
   "1": {"subject": "cap",        "style": "cinematic"},
   "5": {"subject": "thumb-stopper", "style": "asmr"}
 }}

Batches get relabelled. When the mapping is data, a correction is a one-line edit and a re-run; baked into a script it is a rewrite; left in a chat transcript it is gone. Include a note about where the facts came from — the next person will wonder whether to trust it.

Rename safely

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python3 scripts/rename_batch.py --dir variants/ --map subjects.json \
    --pattern "hook-{index:02d}-{subject}-{style}-body-{treatment}" \
    --set treatment=unedited --manifest variants.json          # dry run
python3 scripts/rename_batch.py ... --apply                    # commit

The script refuses to run rather than half-finish: it checks every source exists, that no target collides with a different file, and that the pattern actually produces unique names. It is idempotent — a second run reports "already named" instead of double-renaming — and it updates the build manifest so later steps still find the files.

Four things to get right around a rename:

• Dry run first, always. The output is the review; read it before --apply.
• Update the manifest (variants.json or equivalent), or the next tool in the chain looks for files that no longer exist.
• Republish the review canvas if the batch is already on one, and print the filename on each card so canvas ↔ disk is a direct match. A reviewer saying "number 7 is the one" and a folder where 7 is something else is exactly the confusion this skill exists to remove.
• Do not rename a file someone already has. If it has been delivered and downloaded, ship the new name as a new copy or tell them plainly that the names changed. The repo rule that delivered files are never overwritten applies to their names too.

House patterns

If a new batch does not fit these, choose the axes first and write them down in the handover before renaming 40 files — the pattern is much cheaper to change before it exists.

Files

Related skills: hook-variations (produces the batch this most often names), video-review-canvas (where the names need to match the cards).