Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English • Hacker News Board

Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

#71

Post by setrf » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 12:23 AM UTC

dan_sbl wrote: post #25

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?

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.

Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

#72

Post by dgunay » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 12:29 AM UTC

I 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.

Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

#73

Post by stuaxo » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 12:30 AM UTC

I 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.

Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

#74

Post by stuaxo » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 12:32 AM UTC

asdf88990 wrote: post #54

Nothing 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.

You can't de-slop it you can only make it less slop.

AI slop doesn't die at all.

Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

#75

Post by Syntaf » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 12:37 AM UTC

hsaliak wrote: post #43

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”

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.

Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

#76

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:03 AM UTC

Merkur wrote: post #3

nice :-) i'll try that! thx

[deleted]

Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

#77

Post by dcl » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:03 AM UTC

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.

Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

#78

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:16 AM UTC

dcl wrote: post #77

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.

[deleted]

Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

#79

Post by sixhobbits » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC

Planktonne wrote: post #34

This 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...

Yes the prompt "only output ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English" does the same thing as the skill.

But it's very useful and skills is a good way to share promots, so whatever.

Try the skill or the prompt. It will likely improve your experience interacting with agents

Re: Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

#80

Post by what » Fri, Jul 31, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC

baby_souffle wrote: post #62

skissane wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> "scroll up, read through and give me the top `n` things that were difficult..."

Why do you think it can answer that? It has zero clue.