> ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) is a controlled natural language that is designed to simplify and clarify technical documentation. It was originally developed in the 1980s by the European Association of Aerospace Industries (AECMA) at the request of the European airline industry, which wanted a standardized form of English for aircraft maintenance documentation that could be easily understood by non-native English-speakers.
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.
Gemini 3.8 for me always outputs in a concise way at the level understandable for any computer science masters graduate. Clear, to the point, a bit of formula for background when really required instead of the same formula in Prose, etc.
- Gemini 3.8 has a beautiful answer. Typography, use of lists, brevity, style, even the font choice on the web harness -- all of it is A tier or even S tier. Notice I didn't say answer quality. The answer is always extremely mid, and the harder the question (or more effort needed to answer it), Google just quits. I give it a "C" on answer quality
- ChatGPT (Chat, pre 6, I assume 5.6 although they commonly hide the model picker): Ugly answer. Runs on printing page after page of unnecessary side notes. Mostly just walls of texts in paragraphs with little thought to information design. However, inside of that mess of text is almost always the answer I'm looking for, and it's almost always incredibly better than the truncated, desgined Gemini answer.
For a while I ran all of my question queries on Gemini and ChatGPT, but I noticed that I basically always picked ChatGPT's answer head to head.
Interesting that this hasn’t been my experience. ChatGPT has often gave me with pages of text dripping with confidence about a solution for my problem. Diving very quickly into implementation details. Even if I tell it to stay in the problem and product fit level.
Gemini on the other hand somehow always outputs at the level that I am expecting and reasoning.
I even found it was capable of stepping back from code implementation and bug hunting to “hang on, it’s not the algorithm that is incorrectly implemented, it is the wrong algorithm for the goal.” GPT Sol (5.6,6 and 6.1) just kept hammering in the problem.
To be clear, I'm discussing non-technical use of Gemini and ChatGPT through the web harness.
While I do rarely use the web harnesses for technical research, nearly all of my technical questions are going through coding harnesses and layers of my local context, skills, etc, so what I produce from codex/claude code is not comparable to what others produce.
So my comparison of the web harnesses is me asking questions about caring for my baby, or product comparisons of new televisions, or visualizing a room organized differently (google sucked at this so bad, chatgpt did great), or asking for help in a video game, or other normie AI uses lol
I will say, Gemini is the best for asking about google services, such as Flights or Youtube.
My go to phrase that I’ve found to work well is “please restate in high school English with direct declarative sentences and no parentheticals or references that require recalling previous turns of this conversation”
The problem with Claudish isn't that it's technically poor English, the problem is that it's information-sparse waffle most of the time. It's like dealing with a colleague who needs several paragraphs of tedious preamble to make a point when you just want them to spit it out and be done with it. It also does a great deal of vague gesturing at thoughts without actually instantiating them directly, for example by using the same tired metaphors to the point they don't actually convey a thought any more.
If I say Claude talks like a meringue it's patently obvious what I'm trying to convey, sweet but full of empty space. If you hear that same metaphor day-in day-out then after a while it doesn't call up a thought at all, it's just an annoying verbal habit.
Unfortunately they're making a choice for all of us, because tech companies only ever cater to the majority user.
So now the generation that grew up on IMs, whose standards of communication is "lol ok thx" and "i cannot read sentence with commas in it", are having difficulty with reading Claude, and in response, Anthropic is reducing their models' communications skills to match.
Realistically, if the market caters to the lowest common denominator, then we either need to adjust that denominator ( unlikely -- people don't really change ), adjust the market ( hard, but not impossible ) or adjust ourselves ( easiest, but possibly not useful for things other than putting along ).
I am not exactly the person to normally to argue along the lines of 'build your own ISP/network/platform/model/we', but it will still be easier than fighting against collective nature of society.
What is absolutely crazy to me is that llms allow an insane way to accumulate knowledge and maybe even some skills - though ai doomers/boosters will argue over what that actually means -- and people's apparent response is:
Ultimately the general public finds itself in the position where they’re going to find a life where: they have no control over it but it is reasonably enjoyable provided that you don’t want anything outside of what is provided by the corporate free service tier.
There is plenty wrong as we use more and more complex machines with less and less access under the hood without crowbar or a super secret handshake. The amusing part is that it is bound to change now -- just not for the reasons I like.
My most used prompt in the last week is probably "Explain this concisely and simply, like I am a child".
I spent years dumbing things down and creating visuals to support it for decision makers. I am frequently asking ChatGPT to do the same for me.