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Okay 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.

nice :-) i'll try that! thx
Honestly I should use this on my own emails and slack messages.
["Skill", "Force"]

Pick one.

What 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

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.

I wish this were selectable as the default output style.
Anyone tried this as an output style and not just as a skill?
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?

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.

No semicolons — write two sentences.

Oh lord.

The 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.

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.

STE is part of the training set, so the skill is redundant and only pollutes your context window.
The 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.

Man, I was just now imploring Claude to be more concise.
The irony of vibing a de-sloppinator
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...

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.
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”