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Comment by juancn

1 day ago

Just set the following incantation:

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

8 comments

juancn

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vardalab  1 day ago

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"

  • zachahn  1 day ago

    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.

mechazawa  1 day ago

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.

  • cjk  1 day ago

    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.

    • zachahn  1 day ago

      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.)

ivankabiden  17 hours ago

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.

camkego  1 day ago

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