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Comment by juancn | Hacker News Reader

Just set the following incantation:

    You must use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) when it doesn't detract from meaning.

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I actually changed the output style for Claude Code to use ASD-STE100 and it still doesn't help that much. It still comes up with a lot of stupid words like this gem "Standing where it stood"

Yeah I agree... I also tried output styles, tried using hooks to repeatedly tell it to be a little better. I don't think it helped, as I was always frustrated with it.

I found vomit with a small LLM much better than anything Opus 5 ever wrote. I don't think Opus 5 can write.

This doesn't work for me. The output gets messed up when the model is overloaded, no matter what. The cognitive load is too much if it has to optimise for readability at the same time.. or it's not trained to be able to do that.

I usually get output at the end of a long task. At that point I'm going to use a subagent with no context to reword it. Haiku does a great job with writing style so I've been using that, the main agent will fix any inaccuracies.

I'll give that a try. Hopefully it reduces the text vomit Claude tends to do.

Right now all I have is

> - Give terse and concise answers unless the user asks you to elaborate. Big walls of text are not usefull when trying to communicate.

Don't bother, no incantation can fix it.

I recently asked Claude (Opus 5) to give me guidance on how to instruct it to be less verbose in a way that it will _actually follow_. Its response was something to the effect of (and I'm heavily paraphrasing here) "'Succinct' and 'short' aren't objective measurements. Try providing a strict word budget instead."

Given that guidance, I tried specifying "Unless I ask you to elaborate, respond with no more than one paragraph, using sentences of 20 words or fewer." It works...ish. I still see it violate this rule regularly, but it's less bad IME.

FWIW, I think this is good guidance since it does match Anthropic's documentation. They say that every rule should have a non-subjective way to determine pass/fail.

(I said "good guidance" but it might be more correct to say that it's the best guidance we have, it's what Anthropic says about their own model.)

I just tried this with Fable, and so far, it look fantastic, thank you so much.

I found ISO 24495-1 to be much better than ASD-STE100. ASD-STE100 can be counterproductive since its vocabulary is restricted and it often replace accurate technical terms with simple but vague phrases.

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