Decay markers

As you scroll a file you’ll sometimes see a small decay marker beside a cell: an icon or coloured chip in the cell’s gutter. It’s one of Aquilla’s most useful signals, and one of the most misunderstood.

What a decay marker means

A decay marker means: this cell still needs validation attention.

It is action-framed: it points to work still to do. It is never a “this cell is healthy/done” badge.

The absence of a marker is silence, not approval. No marker means decay hasn’t crossed the warning threshold: it doesn’t mean a human has confirmed the cell.

The marker only appears on a translated cell that no one has validated yet, and only when it is far from any validated work. That keeps the workspace calm: only the cells that most need a look are flagged. You can make markers appear sooner or later with Attention threshold in Project Settings → Health.

What “decay” means

Decay is how far a cell is from work someone has already validated, not whether the translation is good.

A cell someone has validated has no decay.
Validating a cell also helps other cells in the same file whose source text is similar, as long as they were translated the same way. Their decay drops too, and their markers may disappear.
A translated cell with nothing validated near it has high decay and gets a marker.

So decay is asking: “has someone checked this cell, or work like it, or is it still an unreviewed corner of the project?”

How to clear a decay marker

You reduce a cell’s decay by getting it validated. As reviewers work through the reviewer queue and validate cells, those cells drop to zero decay, cells with similar text nearby improve too, and markers disappear.

Decay vs. violations

Decay is separate from built-in checks. A check violation (like an empty target cell) is its own kind of flag and does not count toward decay. The two answer different questions:

Decay / health: “has this been reviewed?”
Violations: “does this cell look like it has a problem?”