A tag interface plus a runtime discriminator

A tag carries no members. It exists so that unrelated classes — persistence rows, search results, locally created records — can appear in one list and be accepted by one renderer:

interface HomeContentType
interface LibraryType

Where the renderer genuinely has to branch, the tag adds a nested enum and one accessor:

interface PlaylistType : HomeContentType, LibraryType {
    enum class Type { REMOTE, RADIO, LOCAL, ALBUM, SERIES }
    fun playlistType(): Type
}

@Composable fun ContentTile(data: HomeContentType) { … }   // one renderer, two screens

Multiple inheritance is the mechanism, and it is the reason to reach for a tag at all: a tag that extends two other tags makes each of its implementors renderable by both screens' renderers, without either screen's list type learning about the other's.

Choose a tag over a sealed hierarchy when the implementors cannot all live in one module. A sealed interface buys exhaustive when and costs a closed world — every implementor compiled together, in one module. When the members are persistence entities, transport results and rows created by feature code, forcing them into one module inverts the dependency direction the layering already fixed. When they can live together, seal them; the checking is worth more than the reach.

Traps

You gave up exhaustiveness, and the price is paid once per field. A when (data) over a tag can never be exhaustive, so it needs an else, and the renderer needs one such when for every field it reads — one composable inspected here branches over the same tag once per field it renders: the image, its placeholder, its error image, and each line of text. Add an implementor and every one of them falls to else together: it compiles, it renders, and the tile is blank. Keep the branches adjacent in one when returning a small carrier, so an omission is one hole and not one per field.

The discriminator must be total, or an implementor will answer wrongly. One tag here declares SONG, ALBUM, ARTIST, PLAYLIST. A series entity implements it, has no member of its own, and so its accessor returns PLAYLIST — compiling, silent, permanent, and unrecoverable downstream. The proof that this is the enum's fault and not the entity's: that same class also implements a second tag whose enum does have a member for it, and there it answers accurately. Every new implementor is a reason to re-check the enum; adding a member is cheap, and the compiler then points at the when branches that need it.

Two tags cannot both name their accessor the same. Each tag's enum is its own nested type, so fun objectType(): Type on two tags means two functions with the same name and parameter list and different return types. One class can implement at most one of them. The set inspected here only works because the tag most often combined with the others names its accessor differently — a constraint nobody wrote down, which the next tag added will break. Give each tag's accessor a name derived from the tag.

The tag's name will collide with something. A tag named for a concept and an unrelated enum named for the same concept both end up imported in the same file, and every consumer needs an import … as alias. Aliases are fine; discovering the need at the fifth call site is not. Name tags for their role in the list rather than for the concept.

Cast-and-skip is where items disappear. item as? Something ?: return@items inside a list builder produces no row, no log and no failure. It is the shape that turns "this type is not handled yet" into "the list is one shorter than the data". Prefer a branch that renders a visible fallback, or at minimum reports the unhandled type once.

filterIsInstance<Tag>() narrows a mixed list by silently discarding. It is the right tool when the list is genuinely mixed and one section renders one tag — but the discarded remainder is invisible by construction. Compare the sizes before and after when the list is supposed to be homogeneous.

A tag pulls same-named types from independent packages into one when. Three classes named Content, from three packages, cannot all be imported, so their branches read as fully qualified is some.package.Content -> lines. That is not a smell to fix — it is the tag doing its job — but it makes the when unreadable at a glance, so keep those branches in the same order everywhere.

Verifying it

List a tag's implementors together with what each one answers:

TAG=YourTagInterface
grep -rnE "(:|,)[[:space:]]*$TAG" --include="*.kt" . | grep -w "$TAG"

Read every hit that is a property declaration rather than a supertype as a finding in itself — that is the name collision above, an unrelated type wearing the tag's name.

Then check the discriminator is total, and that every member it declares can be reached. Ask the two questions separately — one grep for who answers a member, one for who branches on it:

echo "-- answered by:"
grep -rn -A6 "override fun " --include="*.kt" . | grep -E "$TAG\.Type\.[A-Z_]+" \
  | sed -E "s|.*/([A-Za-z0-9_]+)\.kt[-:][0-9]+[-:].*$TAG\.Type\.([A-Z_]+).*|\2  \1|" | sort -u
echo "-- branched on:"
grep -rnE "$TAG\.Type\.[A-Z_]+ *->" --include="*.kt" . \
  | grep -oE "$TAG\.Type\.[A-Z_]+" | sed -E "s|$TAG\.Type\.||" | sort -u

The window on the first grep is what catches an accessor that picks between members over several lines; widen it if an implementor decides over more. Several implementors answering one member is normal — a persistence row and a search result are both legitimately albums, and unifying them is what the tag is for. The findings are narrower: a member answered by a class that is not that concept — the series entity answering PLAYLIST — and a member that appears in the first list but never in the second, which renders through else.

Finally, make sure no two tags are competing for one accessor name:

grep -rhoE "fun [a-zA-Z][A-Za-z0-9_]*\(\): Type" --include="*.kt" . | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn

Any count above one is a pair of tags that no single class will ever be able to implement together.