feat(apex): lead the hero with why, not the paste command

[isuttell]

Summary

A real visitor bounced off the live apex landing site saying "I must not be in the industry. I just don't understand what this is for." The hero led with a how-to instruction ("Paste this into a shell-capable agent. It installs agent-paste...") plus a second imperative restating the action, so two HOW sentences stacked before the visitor was ever told WHAT the product is or WHY they'd want it. The headline ("Open it anywhere") promised value; the subhead immediately talked about shells and JavaScript. This rewrite leads with the human pain and payoff, then routes the reader into the copy-prompt funnel. The marketing page is human-focused; agents read /agents.md and /llms.txt, not this page.

Diagnosed and validated with a 3-lens adversarial review (cold visitor, ICP developer, brand enforcer) grounded in YC's website-clarity guidance. All three originally ranked the live hero last; all three pass the rewrite.

Changes

• Hero lead rewritten human-first: "Your AI agent built a report, a dashboard, a prototype, and it is trapped in a chat window. agent-paste turns it into a link you can open in any browser and send to anyone. Tell your agent to publish it; you get the link."
• Dropped the redundant HERO.heroAction "Copy the prompt... / See the session" directive.
• Added a "When you'd reach for it" use-cases block under the demo (concrete jobs, each ending in the link).
• Reordered the detail pane so mechanism (commands, MCP) and the reasons-to-believe sit below the fold; extended the reveal stagger to .d7/.d8.
• Reframed the four feature titles from mechanism to benefit; dual-audience detail stays in the body as a human payoff.
• Aligned META_DESCRIPTION (search snippet) to the human-first framing, under the 125-char crawler cap.
• De-flated the static example page: stopped captioning it "static demo artifact, not a live page".
• Filed deferred follow-ups in docs/ops/apex-landing-todo.md (live feat-of-strength, fabricated demo link, headline-word A/B, banned-token test hardening), linked from project-status.

Risk: LOW

• Areas touched: apex marketing copy + page structure + one static example page + ops docs. No app logic.
• Security: none.
• Performance: none (static prerender).
• Breaking: none.

Test plan

• pnpm verify green
• pnpm test:coverage green (CI Validate gate)
• apex render tests pass (meta-length cap, clipboard targets, em-dash ban hold)
• ziw-code-review: clean, no findings, READY FOR PR
• Deployed to preview (preview.agent-paste.sh): new hero served, old copy gone, use-cases block present, block order correct, example page de-flated

Issue: AP-374

@coderabbitai ignore

[cursor]

Risk: simple
Decision: approve

Ticket triage

• Intended change: Rewrite the apex landing hero to answer what/why before mechanism (human pain → shareable link), add a "When you'd reach for it" use-cases block, reorder detail-pane content, reframe feature titles to benefits, align META_DESCRIPTION, and de-flate the static example page caption.
• Scope match: Yes. All in-scope items from AP-374 are present; deferred follow-ups are documented in docs/ops/apex-landing-todo.md.

Review findings

• Blocking: None.
• Non-blocking:
  • Fabricated demo Access Link remains (pre-existing; filed as follow-up #2 in apex-landing-todo.md).
  • Banned-token test hardening deferred (follow-up #4); acceptable for this copy-only change.
  • No structural test for the new use-cases block — consistent with render.test.tsx policy of asserting contracts, not marketing prose.

Merge checklist

• Ticket linked: ✅ AP-374
• Scope matches: ✅
• Checks green: ✅ Validate, CodeQL, Secret scan, Postgres smoke
• Tests/docs appropriate: ✅ Render contract tests + ops follow-up ledger
• No blocking findings: ✅
• No high-risk areas: ✅ Marketing copy/static HTML only
• Merge-safe: ✅

Summary

Clean, focused marketing rewrite. heroAction removal is safe — the demo block still carries the copy-prompt funnel below the fold. META_DESCRIPTION is 110 chars (under the 125-char cap). Reveal stagger extended correctly for the new block order. Approve for merge.

  

_{Sent by Cursor Automation: First Pass PR Reviewer}

[github-actions]

agent-paste PR preview resources were cleaned up. The shared Preview GitHub Environment is retained for future preview deploys.