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Comment by NL807 | Hacker News Reader

Not sure if something like this is already on the table, but I would like to see Claude responses more in line with Simplified Technical English [1] by default. I find those writing styles a lot easier to read. This has been standardised as ASD-STE100 [2]. I've seen few people making SKILL.md files with that in mind, which works great, but having this by default without invoking the skill command would be better.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Technical_English

2. https://asd-ste100.org/

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"All people agree on this rule. A single man with high wealth must find a wife." -- Jane Austbot

I don't get your comment. Care to explain?

That's the opening line to Pride and Prejudice, where Jane Austen (I guess the "bot" part of the name is intentional) states something that many people of the time would superficially agree on, but which is intended to be highly ironic.

I guess the point of GP (and of Jane Austen) is that people never actually universally agree on anything. And when they superficially do, there is actually a large undercurrent of disagreement.

Another fun quote apropos here would be "I love standards, there are so many to choose from"

I think the joke is that he massively simplified the line down into simplified English.

But I think that's fine as I don't want Claude to write literature, I want it to solve problems.

There's a great book from a different line that delves into this as a form of what the author calls 'manifold objectivism'. In short, there are some big concepts like Christianity or Islam that people refer to as if it's the same thing but almost nobody has a shared meaning when they refer to such big things. Even so there can be concrete dialogues about these topics from different frames and with different underlying meanings.

There's trouble though when either there is conflict that isn't reconciled between the interlocutors or worse, when there is a satisfactory conclusion between the two interlocutors who never accounted for the divergent definitions ... there are many 'objective' understandings of what a thing is.

"A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism"

> short, there are some big concepts like Christianity or Islam that people refer to as if it's the same thing but almost nobody has a shared meaning when they refer to such big things. Even so there can be concrete dialogues about these topics from different frames and with different underlying meanings.

See Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations for a deeper treatment of that topic.

If I have to guess, GP tried to translate following quote from Jane Austen into ASD-STE100:

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

They gave a point that it sort of inverts tbe meaning

I am guessing "simple English will help your dating life"? (If, any. Or, code).-

I must have missed something but can't you just prompt it to answer in your desired style? What am I missing here.

Commenting because I am struggling with this too, claude code seems to be so verbose no matter how I prompt it.

You can prompt it, and it almost immediately forgets. Or context compaxtion purges ut. Or it somewhat communicates with you in it, but writes all comments and docs in its original bloated style.

Training supersedes random markdown files and prompts

No, training tends to override system prompts at lot of the time.

Let's say Claude Code's system prompt is updated to recommend responding in Simplified Technical English. It'll work for the current generation of models. But Anthropic will train the next generation via RL on Claude Code traces as they do today. As long as they don't change their reward design, the next generation is going to be pulled towards Claudish again, because speaking Claudish gives higher rewards, so in the end the prompt doesn't really matter.

Ideally these things shouldn't work like this but this seems to be the sorry state of RL right now.

You miss that it is not just your prompt but also the various system prompts, plus how the model was trained. But you can reduce the verbosity (also with a setting in /config).

And memory and code comment styles - i think that’s a big one people forget about. You can prompt it all you want, when it sees elaborate comments in memory and code it will follow the style

But you can prompt it to reduce the verbocity of the comments as a project in itself - I will probably try Fable 5.1 for this.

Training is far more important than user prompts

I've told ai to distill Google's developer documentation style guide and IMO it works much better.

https://developers.google.com/style

IMO that would be a mistake because Simplified Technical English cannot properly represent business domains specifically when talking about using specific concepts from those domains. It can explain those concepts but I think it will fail short or naming them.

So I think making that default as it is will create bugs. I ran an experiment here https://allaboutcoding.ghinda.com/explain-to-me-in-simple-te... (of course it is fit to my usage) see section "What about understanding and facts" and ASD-STE100 fails, in my experiment, to return facts as I have defined them in those cases compared with no instruction or just saying "use Simple Technical English".

Well that is why it is technical English. I wouldn't use it to explain business concepts, but it is perfect for explaining logical flows and how something works.

I was replying to someone saying to make this the default.

While this is good for _technical english_ it is not a good default as a good default should work for most of the people in most of the cases.

IMHO the case for explaining logical flows and how someting works is just one case even when using Claude Code in programming so a default will not make sense.

>I was replying to someone saying to make this the default.

Fair criticism and I see your point. Perhaps making this as one of the optional defaults writing styles (amongst others) would be better.

If someone has a way to tame GLM into doing this then please…

As a workhorse, GLM is so good, but goodness, its prose, wherever needed, makes me feel like going to a park and kicking all the benches there endlessly. And it doesn't change!

I have instructions to combine style of Brooks, Steven King and Economist Style Guide, while avoiding anything that may put wrong emphasis („genuinely“, „load-bearing“) does not contribute anything meaningful („X rather than Y“). The output is quite good* so far even on Opus 4.7-5, when it concerns product requirements. The key is to identify the pattern and focus on the meaning of the undesirable language.

* chemistry + regulations + infosec domains

I've tried controlling it via fine-tuning Claude.md and in-session messages/instructions. It always results in failure and then "Yes, guardrails are already there. I still failed" and it feels like "I am like this. Deal with it". I've even tried languages that avoids negatives e.g. "Don't.." "never.." etc. Nope. Just doesn't work.

Few more tips to make failures more rare: 1. interactive orchestrator just ensures that process is followed and the progress towards North Star objective is steady and with predictable quality. 2. Agents use specific skills which have output gates, one of which is always quality of writing and reasoning. Orchestrator accepts work only if gate criteria are met.

This is going to make work much slower and token consumption higher. ROI from fixed rate subscriptions is still quite good. ROI from volume-based subscriptions needs to be watched carefully.

By default? I doubt it would be useful or desirable for 95% of users. I'm guessing most people find natural language easiest to read, STE seems to be like a project almost akin to Esperanto or Lojban.

STE is a much more natural language than whatever Anthropic's models produce: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49528326

I don't know, in my experience the chat output has been fairly natural.

The quoted sentence seems to be from some "model internals". Of course that can be incomprehensible, what an AI assistant is really doing is just statistically generating text with some bells and whistles to make it do useful stuff. Poking around in the internals doesn't seem like a good use of time? Comparable to cat:ing a compressed file, of course you get garbage.

I'm talking about the value of making the output in STE style, which doesn't seem useful. The value of having internal stuff in a given writing style would have to be evaluated as to whether it improves model performance.

> The quoted sentence seems to be from some "model internals".

I get these kinds of responses all the time.

> I'm talking about the value of making the output in STE style, which doesn't seem useful.

It is extremely useful. Because model output is literally what you wrote: "statistically generating text with some bells and whistles to make it do useful stuff". And in the past few months all Anthropic models have been outputting insanely bloated jargon-laden bullshit. If I see another "this leg of the decision tree holds the simple fact", I will scream.

I don't want this "internal" monologue when it talks to me, writes documents, or outputs comments in code.

It's so bad that Anthropic employees have admitted it, including the top-voted comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49525809

Why not include this in your initial prompt when starting the session or into the global base prompt?

Because skill adherence is awful, especially after a few turns.

Eh? STE is designed for procedural writing, e.g. "if you have a problem, press this button". I generally don't ask advanced AI to give me step-by-step instructions.

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