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- Hacker News
- the 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.
by boardwaalk - No semicolons — write two sentences.
Oh lord.
by alehlopeh - 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.by gillesjacobs - I 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" - One 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.by dcl
- It definitely seems like this should be a post processing layer instead of an instruction.by solenoid0937
- Does 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...
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.
by gregsadetsky - Yea, viral tweetby heymijo
- Gotta 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.pd...
by summarity - How 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.by aesthesia
- It’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.
by bayesnet - The readme looks to me concise and correct. Tested it and it works. Better than many human-written readmes I've seen around.by gchamonlive
- They 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)
by mcintyre1994 - I've been using a plain ASD-STE100 prompt for a little bit now, and while I somewhat prefer the text that agents produce while being told to use simplified English, it does not necessarily change the overall structure of what they write. It just now tends to have shorter sentences, and fewer drumroll, pitch-deck / vacuous section titles like "the finding that pivots the preposition", etc. Overall a significant quality increase in my opinion, but nothing earth shattering, and doesn't fully solve the problem.by danielbarla
- Seems 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”
by hsaliak - Does 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.
by Syntaf - I like the idea, but not sold on the skill.
But did lead to me finding https://vale.sh and its various available linters. Might give that a try.
by jpease - How would one use Vale in LLM documentation?by aurareturn
- STE is part of the training set, so the skill is redundant and only pollutes your context window.by lab14
- STE Misapplication issues and limited adoption
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English#M...
by abeyer - LLMs 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.by baq
- Love 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.
by dragonwriter - On 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
Tends to produce relatively well structured prose that’s easy to edit.
by tajd - Just to clarify: a skill isn't the same as a plugin.by sbene970
- I 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?
by dan_sbl - I 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.by setrf
- The 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.
by Ferret7446