danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill
267 stars · Last commit 2026-07-20
ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English rules, repurposed as a Claude Code skill for rewriting ambiguous agent-facing English.
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# ASD-STE100 Skill — Simplified Technical English for Agent Output A Claude Code skill that rewrites dense, ambiguous English into [ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English](https://www.asd-ste100.org/) (STE) — the controlled-language standard the aerospace and defense industry built so aircraft maintenance instructions cannot be misread. This skill repurposes that same discipline for a different reader: an **AI agent** parsing another agent's output, a tool description, an error message, or an inter-agent instruction, with no human in the loop to resolve ambiguity. ## Why STE, and Why for Agents STE exists because a misread instruction on an aircraft can kill people, and the intended readers were often not native English speakers with no author to call for clarification. The standard's fix: one meaning per word, active voice, simple tenses, one instruction per sentence, short sentences, no dropped words. An LLM agent parsing another agent's output is in a strikingly similar position — no back-channel, no way to ask "did you mean X or Y?" The same rules that keep a mechanic from misreading a torque spec keep a downstream agent from misreading a tool description or an inter-agent message. ## Before / After | Before | After | |---|---| | "This tool will attempt to synchronize state across the various backends that have been configured, and if a conflict is detected it may resolve it automatically depending on the strategy that has been set, or otherwise it will surface the conflict for manual review." | "The tool synchronizes state across the configured backends. If it finds a conflict, it checks the current strategy. If the strategy allows automatic resolution, the tool resolves the conflict. If not, the tool reports the conflict for manual review." | | "An error may have occurred while processing your request due to a possible mismatch in the expected data format, which could be caused by an outdated client version." | "The request failed. The data format did not match what the server expected. Check your client version — an outdated client is the most common cause." | More examples, including illustrations of the official STE rules themselves, in [`examples/before-after.md`](examples/before-after.md).