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Comment by adamcharnock | Hacker News Reader

My latest trick (literally from yesterday) is to just ask it to write according to ISO 24495-1, the standard for plain language:

> [This standard is] for anybody who creates or helps create documents. The widest use of plain language is for documents that are intended for the general public. However, it is also applicable, for example, to technical writing, legislative drafting or using controlled languages.

You don't actually have the buy the standard, but this is it: https://www.iso.org/standard/78907.html

And you can read it for free here: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:std:iso:24495:-1:ed-1:v1:en

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Keep in mind all this kind of stuff can make the model less capable. If it has to think in "plain" English, it may well be squashing quality of code etc output.

I'm not sure how true this is, but when using "forced" json output it def had a big drop off in quality - https://arxiv.org/html/2408.02442v3.

I think you're better not fighting it with hacks like this and find a different model.

Changing output style shouldn't affect thinking at all.

Tell that to all the CLAUDE.md lines across dozens of repos I have to write to get them to understand that git commit standards and PR description standards are different.

I would not overgeneralize from paper. Firstly: forcing JSON output is, in my opinion, a bigger change than asking it to match the above style guidelines, and secondly, as is always the case with these kinds of papers, what was true for the model tested in the paper may either be completely false, or greatly reduced, in later models. That paper is almost 2 years old and models today have been trained in very different ways (or more accurately post trained in very different ways) and are in general far more capable.

Based on that paper, I would maybe try to check if it was true for a modern use case, I would very much not assume it was still true.

how about stuff likes https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman is it also make the model less capable?

A quick web search brought me to this: a Claude skill for all the ISO 24495 “writing styles”... https://github.com/GaZmagik/iso-24495

I also added this custom instruction in Codex:

"Only report to me in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English."

Yeah I'm using this and have been happy with it.

> And you can read it for free here: https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:std:iso:24495:-1:ed-1:v1:en

Actually, only the first few pages are available there (introductions, Sections 1-3.8). The meat of the document, Section 5 ("Guidelines") is completely absent.

See:

> Only informative sections of standards are publicly available. To view the full content, you will need to purchase the standard by clicking on the "Buy" button.

Does this actually work for you? Do you provide access to the text of the standard, or literally just say "write according to ISO 24495-1"?

I doubt you have to do anything more than that very prompt. I suspect the model has the full standard in its training set, which means it also gets the gist of it due to not just the general associations it makes but also the amount that it's been cited wherever it's been used.

You could create an output style to make this prevalent.

which is just the same as having it in your AGENTS.md and also having a agent_settled hook that reminds it on how to talk

can u share ur claude.md or memory for this?

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