# user (10-user.com)

A person who uses something. It could be someone on a website, a customer, a member, or anyone interacting with a product or service.

## What a model may hear
- account identity (operating systems and databases): treat as a login name with permissions, passwords, and access controls
- end consumer (product management and UX design): assume the person has limited technical skill and needs simplified interfaces
- function argument (programming (especially Python decorators and dependency injection)): inject a user object or require a user parameter in code
- table or schema (databases and ORMs): query a users table with fields like user_id, username, created_at
- license metric (software pricing): count as a billable seat or named individual for subscription limits

## Where people and models part ways
- Says: "Delete the user"
  Means: Remove this person's account and data from our service
  May be taken as: Drop a database table called users or cascade-delete related records unexpectedly
  Say instead: "Delete this person's account and all their personal data from our platform"
- Says: "The user wants it"
  Means: Our customer requested this feature
  May be taken as: Assume the request comes from a specific system account or default user profile
  Say instead: "Our customer requested this feature"
- Says: "User is broken"
  Means: A person cannot log in or access the site
  May be taken as: Interpret as corrupted user data in a database or malformed user object in code
  Say instead: "A customer cannot log in to their account"
- Says: "Add a user"
  Means: Create an account for a new team member
  May be taken as: Insert a minimal row into a users table without validation or onboarding steps
  Say instead: "Create a new team member account with full profile setup and welcome email"

## Tips
- Say 'customer,' 'team member,' or 'account holder' when you mean a person, not a system record
- Specify 'database user' or 'system account' when you mean the technical identity
- Mention the service or platform name to ground the model in context
- Avoid 'the user' as a generic subject; name the role or relationship
- When asking about permissions, say 'what can this person do' not 'user permissions'

## Often confused with
- customer: implies a paying or commercial relationship, not just any account
- account: emphasizes the record and credentials, not the living person
- member: suggests belonging to a group or organization with shared access
- client: in software, often means a program or device, not a person
- principal: a security identity that can be a person, service, or machine alike
- subject: in identity systems, any entity that can be authenticated, broader than human