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Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
- handfuloflight 2mo agoOkay here's one of the outputs: > Before you start, make sure that your AWS credentials are correct. If they are not, S3 rejects the upload with a permission error. Wouldn't it be better to write: Before start, ensure AWS credentials are correct. Otherwise, S3 rejects uploads with permission error.
- stavros 2mo agoNo, how is that better?
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- harshreality 2mo agoThe example is unambiguous. Your modification is ambiguous at best. <failure to ensure aws credentials are correct> != <aws credentials are incorrect>
- trhway 2mo agoWhich one would do better in a college essay? I think the original one, and it has higher word count.
- dghlsakjg 2mo agoThe actual STE standard would score horrendously in a college essay. STE encourages simplification and tons of repetition of words that is discouraged by college professors. It is designed to be clear technical writing for people with a loose grasp of English. College writing encourages complex sentence structure, varied word choice for the same concept and other things that make the writing more interesting at the expense of clarity.
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- qznc 2mo agoViolates rule 4.2: Do not omit words or use contractions to shorten sentences. Keep articles, keep "that".
- Merkur 2mo agonice :-) i'll try that! thx
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- evanjrowley 2mo agoHonestly I should use this on my own emails and slack messages.
- bbg2401 2mo agoOh, is ASD-STE100 this week’s mindless productivity/AI-bro trend? Ads-STE100: Simplified Technical English - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101215 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101215 ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English for LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49065956 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49065956 ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075687 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49075687 Show HN: Claude Skill for ASD-STE100 – Simplified English - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49108318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49108318
- xlii 2mo agoNew models (especially Opus 5, released just last week) produces unintelligible output, so people are trying to fix it.
- UqWBcuFx6NV4r 2mo agoWhat’s it like to be this abrasive about people simply doing things?
- bbg2401 2mo agoIt would be nice if people were indeed doing things. However, asking Claude to write a skill encoding ASD-STE100 after seeing it pop-up in your social feed is not doing much at all. It's certainly not worth a post on HN. Having said that, this skill might have been the seed for the flurry of low-effort posts on the subject on various platforms this week. If that's the case, I take back the majority of my scorn. You'll have to excuse me for becoming jaded by the diminishing levels of visible effort put into projects and products shared on here.
- hankbond 2mo ago["Skill", "Force"] Pick one.
- CGMthrowaway 2mo agoHere is the revised post title that follows ASD‑STE100 Simplified Technical English rules: "Agent Skill to Enforce ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English in Documents"
- nikolahristov 2mo ago[dead]
- dahdum 2mo ago[dead]
- codingjoe 2mo agoWhat a wonderful skill. I hate the long and verbose do strings or docs LLMs spit out. This will make a great addition to my docu agent. And I agree, maybe I should use this for my emails too
- bayesnet 2mo agoIt’s ironic that the README has all the tells of being LLM-written: > 53 numbered rules, 9 sections, written in 1983 by people whose readers die when a sentence is ambiguous. The ones doing the heavy lifting: … Not really a promising tell for a writing skill, IMO.
- gchamonlive 2mo agoThe readme looks to me concise and correct. Tested it and it works. Better than many human-written readmes I've seen around.
- mcintyre1994 2mo agoThey acknowledge this, but I really dislike whatever style they're using for the readme: > Yes, this README breaks half of them. Marketing is explicitly out of STE scope. The skill knows that and stays in the docs. > Where it refuses to go: marketing copy, blog voice, brand writing. Flat on purpose. (Each sentence there has an emoji that HN cuts out)
- bcrosby95 2mo agoThe problem with at least ChatGPT is no matter what personality you set it still reads like a smug asshole trying to sound smart. You can just pick different flavors of smug asshole.
- cheema33 2mo ago> The problem with at least ChatGPT is no matter what personality you set it still reads like a smug asshole trying to sound smart. Some of this may be perception rather than reality. I have never felt that ChatGPT was being smug or rude to me.
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- grim_io 2mo agoI wish this were selectable as the default output style.
- tajd 2mo agoOn a related note I wrote a skill to apply the economist style guide to LLM generated writing https://github.com/TAJD/economist-style-guide-plugin https://github.com/TAJD/economist-style-guide-plugin Tends to produce relatively well structured prose that’s easy to edit.
- sbene970 2mo agoJust to clarify: a skill isn't the same as a plugin.
- SoMomentary 2mo agoAnyone tried this as an output style and not just as a skill?
- nevi-me 2mo agoI've added the prompt to use the ASD English, on my CLAUDE.md when I learnt of the standard. The generated output is more tolerable to read, and is less confusing. I like it, and I'll also try the Economist one on another thread here. I have global instructions on how Claude should try to write things like I do. I generally avoid having lots of skills, security risk as I won't vet them all.
- dan_sbl 2mo agoI took one of the examples ("Leveraging sqlpipe's robust...") and just prefixed it with this: > Rewrite this using ASD-STE100 simplified technical English: And you get a good-enough result, it seems? Maybe add another sentence or two for guidance, but what's with needing these giant skills, when ASD-STE100 was surely in the training material?
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- setrf 2mo agoI certainly get what makes you feel that the model should have been wise enough to utilize the knowledge in its pretraining, but it seems like the pretraining data gets pretty muddled in later stages.
- CuriouslyC 2mo agoThe pretraining data isn't getting muddled, the instruction just gets in the lossy middle, and there's less for attention to grab on to. If you repeated the prompt with a hook every turn, it'd stay quite sharp.
- Ferret7446 2mo agoThe training material is used to "develop intelligence" not as reference material. As an analogy, students learn a bunch of things during school, become more intelligent, but do not retain explicit knowledge like all of the details on the periodic table, or all of the exact formulas for things.
- alehlopeh 2mo agoNo semicolons — write two sentences. Oh lord.
- cryo32 2mo agoThe day I have to negotiate and persuade the machine to stop talking shit rather than command it is the day I decide fuck it and go and farm geese or something. Smells like today. I’ll take goose shit over this.
- jpease 2mo agoI like the idea, but not sold on the skill. But did lead to me finding https://vale.sh https://vale.sh and its various available linters. Might give that a try.
- StackOptimistt 2mo ago[dead]
- aurareturn 2mo agoHow would one use Vale in LLM documentation?
- dymk 2mo agoPrecommit hook
- tbhb 2mo agoI use it with a rule package that has a variety of Vale styles for AI writing tells (github.com/tbhb/vale-ai-tells). Typically I have it set up in a project and then gate the agent with post tool use hooks and pre-commit hooks. It's far from perfect but it does help eliminate a lot of the common tells.
- lab14 2mo agoSTE is part of the training set, so the skill is redundant and only pollutes your context window.
- ricardobeat 2mo agoThe very first sections of the README having obvious claude-isms is not very reassuring: > AI slop dies as a side effect > One folder, no dependencies, MIT.
- z3ugma 2mo agoAlso from a nicely explained YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJblcC4lKYw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJblcC4lKYw " The cure for AI slop is a 1986 aircraft manual" https://github.com/woosal1337/blog/tree/main/videos/ep01-the-cure-for-ai-slop https://github.com/woosal1337/blog/tree/main/videos/ep01-the...
- Planktonne 2mo agoThis is cruft [1]. No one who is capable of using this needs it--it's a line in the prompt at most. [1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thinking-quickly-dave-constructs-a-homemade-megaphone https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thinking-quickly-dave-constru...
- alansaber 2mo agohttps://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd
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- rspeele 2mo agoI have yet to see an "agent skill" that does not match this description.
- hedgehog 2mo agoThey are useful for packaging all the related bits together. Some instructions on the line to add to the main prompt, detailed policy doc that spells out details, troubleshooting docs, the code itself, etc.
- QuercusMax 2mo agoAlso skills can often include helper scripts or other binaries which the agent can use to do things it couldn't otherwise.
- skissane 2mo agoHow I use skills: - Create a skill to perform some common task - Watch the agent use it - Wait until the agent makes a mistake - Ask it to update the skill to warn it against making that mistake again I think that, using that iterative process, I end up with something better than just asking it to perform the task plainly One observation: ask an LLM to write a skill, it tends to make them overly verbose and prescriptive. Often, something briefer and human-written actually works better Another: I generally let the LLM propose edits to the skill, but I review them carefully and often modify them, because I find it has a tendency to solve the current problem at the price of worsening the solution to a previous one
- cesarvarela 2mo agoMan, I was just now imploring Claude to be more concise.
- alansaber 2mo agoThe irony of vibing a de-sloppinator
- lfx 2mo agoFlight fire with fire!
- abeyer 2mo agoSTE Misapplication issues and limited adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English#Misapplication_issues_and_limited_adoption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English#M...
- baq 2mo agoLLMs should be unreasonably good at exactly this kind of writing because they’re good translators; regardless in practice it works well to deslopify their writing, been using this in all my prompting in the last week or so, haven’t seen a single load bearing belt and suspenders since.
- dragonwriter 2mo agoLove this line in the critical material quoted there: “Writing correctly in STE is not an easy task as it requires a good command of the English language together with a good knowledge of the matter of the writing.” This is simply what is required for good writing (in English) in any domain with or without STE.
- summarity 2mo agoGotta love how the very first example in Issue 9 of the standard is already self-defeating: > "Test" is an approved noun, but not an approved verb. > STE: Test B is an alternative to test A. So much for clear - unless you know the STE specific rule, the sentence is unambiguously ambiguous. Direct access btw since the official site gates downloads with a Google form: https://www.asd-ste100.org/assets/files/ASD-STE100_ISSUE9.pdf https://www.asd-ste100.org/assets/files/ASD-STE100_ISSUE9.pd...
- aesthesia 2mo agoHow is that ambiguous? The best interpretation I can find where "test" is a verb is an elision: Test [that] B is an alternative to test A. That is an unlikely reading: "test" is a verb in the first instance and a noun in the second, breaking parallelism. And it's just a very unlikely thing to direct someone to do.
- summarity 2mo ago"Test B is an alternative to test A." could mean there's a Test B and a Test A, and they're interchangeable. Or: You can run Test B to confirm A works, that is "to test A". Again the stated goal to clear documentation for non-native or limited-exposure speakers. This doesn't pass that test.
- gillesjacobs 2mo agohttps://youtu.be/uJblcC4lKYw https://youtu.be/uJblcC4lKYw This video benchmarks slop-style indicators with different skill/prompt solutions including the STE skill vs. George Orwell's six rules of writing prompt: Orwell came out on top overall. Additional bonus: it doesn't add much more tokens to input context. I have compared prose prompts with these rules and without and I am liking the results. 1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. 2. Never use a long word where a short one will do. 3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. 4. Never use the passive where you can use the active. 5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. 6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
- ulrikrasmussen 2mo agoI don't know if I have been damaged by reading so much AI, but I swear the narrator of that video had the script for it written by Claude without any of those rules applied. There are so many platitudes and AI-isms in the way he speaks: "now the honesty - those translation gains were real but small" "and here is the honest part" "same disease but with different symptom" "so that brutal 3% number was a Claude quirk, not a law of nature"
- hsaliak 2mo agoSeems to be doing too much, a 1 line in the system prompt is all you need. And it works well enough. “Output tokens are precious, be succinct in your responses. Use ASD-STE100 simplified technical english”
- Syntaf 2mo agoDoes this actually work for you? I've tried adding rules in my user profile as well as adding instruction in my CLAUDE.md but my models always eventually go off the rails and start spewing technical jargon in doc strings & descriptions. At this point I'd do anything to get claude to dumb down and simplify it's explanations in my code, so I'm looking forward to giving this a try and seeing how it goes.
- NamlchakKhandro 2mo agoUse gpt ⁵. ⁵or⁶ Clause is a token torment machine that licks your balls while stealing your wallet
- hsaliak 2mo agoyes it does - https://github.com/hsaliak/std_slop/blob/main/system_prompt.md#keep-it-simple https://github.com/hsaliak/std_slop/blob/main/system_prompt.... I've added the same thing to the system prompt of the internal agent I wrote for work, which talks to claude models. I have not gone into the details on whether it adheres to the format exactly, but i do see visibly less slop and less marketing nonsense in the Assistant messages.
- alikhater30000 2mo ago[flagged]
- dylan9n 2mo agoDidnt use it on the readme for the repo
- dawnerd 2mo agoTIL There's a spec for how I normally communicate instructions at work.
- boardwaalk 2mo agothe problem I’ve found with these things is that models drift immediately. if it’s not a git commit hook that runs over docs and comments and commit messages objectively it’s probably useless. which I might try. Claude is so friggin wordy and has no idea how place comments iff they actually matter.
- asdf88990 2mo agoNothing is more comical than AI Slope declaring that I kill AI slop: > your AI writes like a LinkedIn post. make it write like a Boeing manual. > An agent skill that forces LLMs to write docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English: the controlled language aerospace has used since 1983 so a tired mechanic cannot misread an instruction. AI slop dies as a side effect.
- stuaxo 2mo agoYou can't de-slop it you can only make it less slop. AI slop doesn't die at all.
- throwaway219450 2mo agoThe “tired mechanic” is apocryphal at best. ASD was intended to be clear to non-native speakers. Here’s an example from another page: THE SYNTHETIC LUBRICATING OIL USED IN THIS ENGINE CONTAINS ADDITIVES WHICH, IF ALLOWED TO COME INTO CONTACT WITH THE SKIN FOR PROLONGED PERIODS, CAN BE TOXIC THROUGH ABSORPTION. In STE this sentence appears as below: DO NOT GET THE ENGINE OIL ON YOUR SKIN. THE OIL IS POISONOUS. IT CAN GO THROUGH YOUR SKIN AND INTO YOUR BODY. Consider if you translated those phrases into a foreign language you’re basically familiar with. You can be awake as you want and mis-interpret the first one.
- gregsadetsky 2mo agoDoes anyone know why ASD-STE100 is having a moment right now? Viral tweet? I heard about it from a friend, and posted its "spec" here a few days ago: https://asd-web-be-prod.azurewebsites.net/media/wunhmi5y/asd-ste100-issue-9.pdf https://asd-web-be-prod.azurewebsites.net/media/wunhmi5y/asd... Ironically?, you're not allowed to copy from the pdf (yes, trivially defeatable - but why). I guess we'd need a linter (ruff, but for English) that gates whether you're using any non-ASD-STE100 word? Otherwise, yeah, any agent will almost certainly forget this (one line) instruction.
- ericpauley 2mo agoCruft complaints aside, what are people actually doing about this? Claude's prose output is becoming incomprehensible as its coding skill increases, and the concepts it needs to express are becoming more complex as it can handle more complex tasks.
- dgunay 2mo agoI don't understand the challenges involved super well but I feel like this might be better as a piece of actual code (like a linter) that you can run to have an LLM iteratively de-slop its own writing, rather than forcing it out of distribution and having to contend with all the unreliability that entails.
- stuaxo 2mo agoI has quite a lot of luck making docs nicer by asking to "write using the dry/succinct style of ukgov/gds". If you want to take things further you can use linters to enforce the whatever style you want, but just naming it is a good start.
- NothingAboutAny 2mo agoI tried "be concise and respond in a blunt tone" and all that did was add a section to the bottom of every response "here's the blunt concise truth <1 million bullet points>"
- dcl 2mo agoOne question I have about stuff like this: How does it affect the models intelligence or thinking ability. If this modifies the output or chain of thought in any way, it may impact what the model is capable of right? Especially if it's not trained to use this kind of language during training.
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- solenoid0937 2mo agoIt definitely seems like this should be a post processing layer instead of an instruction.
- sergiotapia 2mo agoYou don't need any of this slop. Just add this to your AGENTS.md file, jesus christ. "When writing plans or documentation use: ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE for short)"
- gtirloni 2mo agoI didn't know this even existed. Thanks for sharing.
- aiagenta2z 2mo agoI have a question about how did the project evaluate the technical English performance compared to other skills/MCPs and with LLM w/o skills? In the Github repo, there is a summary of "measured: 6 Claude models × 8 tasks × 2 conditions, 96 runs", Does it means the percentage of violations in the words? If that's the case, the measurement might be a little bit strange weather the STE measure is already in the prompt? STE violations per 100 words ▼ 72.9% (every model won). The bench or evaluation should not be in the same prompt, like eval/test.
- atoav 2mo agoThe examples are not good. In one example (incident report) the agent turns a generic "something went wrong" into overly precise error descriptions that may or may not spill internal details. Then it proceeds to make a promise to implement a persistent monitoring for that problem this week. I mean generally this wouldn't be considered a bad response, but it is deeply problematic if an LLM tasked to just simplify language added both internals and promises to your customers without your knowledge.
- garkotipankaj 2mo agoAgent skills work... sometimes - depends on the agent's mood really. I tried to solve this in a rather opposite way. https://github.com/computerreinvention/trie https://github.com/computerreinvention/trie The documentation is updated and recording the intent behind all changes is enforced by a commit-gate. At the symbol level.
- aidanhs 2mo agoI think you've linked to a private repository.
- garkotipankaj 2mo agoAH. https://github.com/computer-reinvention/trie https://github.com/computer-reinvention/trie Sorry. A missing hyphen!
- antonyragleap 2mo agoI wonder whether the real value is the shared, versioned workflow rather than the prompt itself.
- tizerluo 2mo ago[flagged]
- RicDan 2mo ago[dead]
- markusw 2mo agoUh, nice! I hadn't heard about that spec before. I'll give the skill a try.
- tpoacher 2mo agoI often ask it to aim for a Flesch-Kincaid Readibility Ease Score of around 50, with good results. ELI5 is good too where appropriate. I'll add ASD-STE100 to my list of decorposlopification strategies.
- Avery29 2mo agoI like this. Agent-facing docs feel more like an interface than prose
- shark1 2mo agoprintingpress.dev project is crying out for this skill.
- weiliddat 2mo agoAnecdote: was testing Opus 5 and even ASD-STE100 cannot save you from its meta-commentary and signposting all the time. It writes what it wants to write, e.g. "here's where you are right/wrong" instead of "Your instinct of the shape is right, but here's a sharper version". I could not get it to stop doing that. In contrast if you ask GPT 5.5/5.6 to speak directly/plainly, it will just straight up tell you the content "X is right, Y is wrong". Much preferable.
- guicortei 2mo ago[flagged]
- brodouevencode 2mo agoI've been using this method for about a week - great outcomes from it so far: clear, clean language that sounds like something someone would actually write.
- benslockedin 2mo agotried it out - wrote really basic and then also ai slop - i love the idea of creating context collisions but this particular skill needs an inverse reference that takes the model through the latent space to remove the ai slop - its got legs but I'd consider mixing it with some advertising principles or storytelling so it trains out the mic drop bs