STE is very hyped for AI but has its own smells. It's designed for aircraft maintenance manuals, not software - the two don't share the same vocabulary used to "simply" describe something. I've had a coworker try and "simplify" our documentation with Claude applying STE and the results were equally appalling to read as the Claude-ism laden docs that came before, despite the reading level metrics going down on paper.

I've taken a liking to pointing agents at the Simple English Wikipedia editorial guidelines...but so much of that is for making up for shortcomings of modern Anthropic models. Codex running 6.1-sol explains things so much more clearly that I don't feel I need to assert a style guide on its output.