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? Otherw…
Yea, viral tweet https://x.com/geogristle/status/2078492579511906771
Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
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Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have yet to see an "agent skill" that does not match this description.
How 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 prescript…
> - Ask it to update the skill to warn it against making that mistake again
Yep! I have a canned prompt that basically boils down to "scroll up, read through and give me the top `n` things that were difficult..." and more often than not a small skill or change to `agents.md` comes out of that.
Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
#63This 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-constru...
I have yet to see an "agent skill" that does not match this description.
Oh, skills are absolutely useful for giving the LLM distilled knowledge of things that it doesn't just know ("off the top of its head" so to speak). For example, a company's coding style guide is something that could be very useful to express as a skill.
Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recent-ish models learned to use the same trick engineers played on non-engineers, where they try to sound very smart by overcomplicating very simple concepts. It's very taxing, especially since these are usually multi-paragraph texts. I noticed I've started doing a lot of "hey, you're talking gibberish again" a lot with 5.6 Sol.
I tried letting Fable have a few passes at my docs (ultracode) and the output was basically unreadable. Nothing a human would ever write. I wonder if limiting them to a certain style like STE upfront would make them perform better/worse vs. applying the style after they’re done.
Both. Command the author to use the style, then command a reviewer to check it. Write one skill called review-prose with your rules, and another called write prose which tells the author they will be judged by review-prose, so you only write the rules once.
What I have found is that getting a model to rewrite a badly written passage is hard, because it seems to key off what it reads. It might swap some vocabulary around ok, but it doesn't fix structures very well. So getting it close to the preferred style in the first place is better.
To take this further, if you must fix existing bad prose, write a clean-prose skill which extracts the bare structure of the prose with none of the style, hands it to an author subagent who isn't poisoned with the original bad prose, then hands the output to a reviewer subagent.
Opus 5 writing is horrendous, so I have been experimenting with improving the output!
Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone spends their time browsing hackernews or other forums all day. This is the first time I’m hearing about this, I think it’s nifty, and it’s precisely why I come to hackernews at least once a day. Also what is wrong with using Claude to make a more polished post about something that’s being talked about already?
This is actually completely useless slop and any illusion of usefulness is misguided
Based on what? I wouldn’t have learned about ASD-STE100 if I hadn’t stumbled upon this post. I’m not even going to use the linked GitHub project, just mentioning ASD-STE100 spec in certain prompts makes them useful.
Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
#66Okay 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.
No, how is that better?
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Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
#67I 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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Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not everyone spends their time browsing hackernews or other forums all day. This is the first time I’m hearing about this, I think it’s nifty, and it’s precisely why I come to hackernews at least once a day. Also what is wrong with using Claude to make a more polished post about something that’s being talked about already?
This is actually completely useless slop and any illusion of usefulness is misguided
Since your claim that adhering to a proven style guide is useless slop is not itself useless slop, I am looking forward to your empirical evidence or formal proof that there is no benefit to using it.
Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
#69Cruft 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.
Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have yet to see an "agent skill" that does not match this description.
They 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.
Also skills can often include helper scripts or other binaries which the agent can use to do things it couldn't otherwise.