do-not-ship-an-empty-surface

Trigger

You are about to ship a navigable destination that will be empty for most users: a tab with no
rows, a category with no entries, a dashboard whose data source is not wired up, a page that says
"coming soon".

It does not apply to a surface that is empty because the user has not done anything yet. A task
list with no tasks is correct, and should say how to add one.

Do

1. Decide which kind of empty it is. Empty-because-the-user-is-new needs a good empty state with
   the next action in it. Empty-because-we-have-not-built-it needs to not be there.
2. For the second kind: do not render the destination at all. Generate the route only when there is
   something behind it.
3. If it must exist for development, gate it on a development flag so an installed build cannot
   reach it.
4. Where the emptiness is genuinely the news — a hub with one entry, a feed just started — say so
   in words, and make the invitation to contribute the main content of the page.

Avoid

"Coming soon", "No data yet" with no explanation, and a nav entry that leads to a blank column.
Each one costs the reader a click and returns nothing, and after two of them they stop trusting the
navigation — a cost paid by every other page in the product.

Avoid also the version that looks fine: a category page that renders correctly with zero items. It
does not look broken, so nobody reports it, and it quietly says the project abandoned that topic.

Check

Load the surface with an empty data source and read what a first-time user would see. If the answer
is a heading and whitespace, it should not have shipped.

For generated routes the check is mechanical: assert that the route list is derived from the
content, so a category with no entries produces no page at all.

Risk

Hiding a destination until it has content makes navigation shift as data arrives, which can be
disorienting — a menu that grows between visits needs a reason the user can infer.

This can also be taken too far, into hiding features that are merely unpopular. The line is whether
the surface can ever show something: unbuilt is hidden, unused is shown with a good empty state.