VUV Naming Policy (2026)

The rule: Every public Vox identifier — primitive name, kwarg name, decorator name, type name, decorator-argument enum value — follows a three-step lifecycle:

Announce in a release note: “X has been renamed to Y.”
Alias X to Y in the rename registry. Both names parse. Using X emits a one-line deprecation warning at compile time.
Remove X in the next major version. The registry retains the entry with removed_in: "1.X" for tooling and historical reference.

The codemod: vox migrate reads the rename registry and rewrites every occurrence of an old name in a .vox corpus to its new name. The codemod is byte-equivalent: re-running on a migrated corpus produces no diff.

The registry: contracts/naming/renames.v1.json. Single source of truth. Every rename has from, to, kind (one of primitive, kwarg, decorator, enum_value, type), since (version where the alias was introduced), and optional removed_in (version where the alias becomes a hard error).

No silent renames. A change to a public name without a registry entry is a CI failure. Enforcement: see crates/vox-arch-check.

Why: the dominant LLM-author failure mode in Gradio and Streamlit is that old training corpora contain dead names. A model trained on Gradio 4.x cheerfully emits concurrency_count, Interface.load(), .style() — all dead. Vox is itself a corpus-aware language: MENS retrains on examples/golden/ and the dashboard. We cannot afford uncontrolled churn.

See also: Gradio & Streamlit Research (2026) for the historical evidence; GUI Authoring Syntax (2026) for the current VUV phase plan.