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Public story · 2026-07-31 · high
Testing across six Claude models found a 72.9% drop in writing-rule violations, per the project's GitHub page.
Why now: It hit Hacker News's front page with 309 points and 113 comments by July 31, real traction for a niche writing standard.
SimpleEnglish forces LLM-written documentation through ASD-STE100, a 53-rule controlled-language standard aviation maintenance crews have used since 1983, per its GitHub page.
The stakes are practical. A technician or support engineer reading hedged AI output has to guess at conditions instead of following a direct command. SimpleEnglish's benchmarks show the fix works: testing across six Claude models cut STE rule violations 72.9% per 100 words.
The rules read like a style guide for people who can't afford to misread a sentence. Max 20 words per instruction, active voice only, simple tenses, no hedging modals, and conditions stated before the command they modify. AminBlg built it as an installable skill, npx skills add AminBlg/SimpleEnglish, and says it works across roughly 25 agent frameworks.
The project has 817 stars on GitHub and hit the Hacker News front page with 309 points and 113 comments.
The GitHub page doesn't say whether the 72.9% figure holds for longer-form docs or just short instructional text. It also doesn't break down which of the 53 rules gets violated most often.
Conditions before commands isn't a documentation trick. It's how you'd structure any instruction you wanted followed correctly the first time. If that holds, the next version of this skill won't stop at docs.
Each link below shares sources, entities, or timing with this story.
Cursor supports Claude / Shared entities / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (Cursor supports Claude); both cover CLAUDE, LLM; reported by the same outlet (github.com).
Linked by a graph relationship (Cursor supports Claude); both cover CLAUDE, LLM; reported by the same outlet (github.com).
Claude uses MCP / Shared entity: Claude / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Linked by a graph relationship (Claude uses MCP); both cover Claude; reported by the same outlet (github.com).
Claude uses MCP / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Linked by a graph relationship (Claude uses MCP); both cover CLAUDE, LLM; overlapping topics (agent, claude, skill).
Claude uses MCP / Shared entities / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage
Linked by a graph relationship (Claude uses MCP); both cover Claude, LLM; reported by the same outlet (github.com).
Stack Overflow uses Claude / Shared entities / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Linked by a graph relationship (Stack Overflow uses Claude); both cover CLAUDE, LLM; overlapping topics (agent, claude).
Claude uses MCP / Shared entity: LLM / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Linked by a graph relationship (Claude uses MCP); both cover LLM; reported by the same outlet (github.com).
VS Code supports Claude / Shared entity: CLAUDE / Same source domain / Shared topic / Earlier coverage / Tension
Linked by a graph relationship (VS Code supports Claude); both cover CLAUDE; reported by the same outlet (github.com).