Reading up on ASD-STE100

6 deep · digging since jul 30

I Don’t Want to Read What You Didn’t Write
The author argues AI-generated writing lacks context and humanity, making it unreadable, and advocates using AI only as a verification aid while valuing authentic human writing.
I Don’t Want to Read What You Didn’t Write
The essay argues that AI-generated text is often unreadable without context, advocating for intentional human writing while using AI only as a verification aid.

Takes

We'll be spending a lot more time trying to understand the outputs of language models. A few thoughts, tips & tricks: Writing. Something I've had success with: Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent. But even better: Diagrams / images. Instead of writing, ask your LLM to create a diagram. These can be a lot easier to process, parse, and understand. But even better: Web pages. Ask for output "in HTML" to get a beautiful, interactive webpage. LLMs are getting really good at frontend and can create beautiful experiences, animations, etc. But even better: Explainer videos. The output format I am most bullish on is fully custom / bespoke explainer videos generated on any arbitrary topic. Experiment with things like "Create a 3b1b style video explainer on X. Use my ElevenLabs API key for audio narration". (you'd need an API key for the latter or you can ask your LLM to find you decent free alternatives that use your local compute). This is actually starting to work! In summary: - As LLMs get better, they will do more and more of the legwork autonomously, and a lot more of our work will rise up the abstractions into oversight and understanding. - Luckily, LLMs can help here too because as intelligence and code are increasingly abundant, you can ask for large, custom, discardable software artifacts (e.g. web apps, video explainers) that would have never made sense to create before. Push the boundaries here and you'll be surprised.
@karpathy
Seeing so many people using ASD-STE100 / Simplified Technical English now Enjoy!
@DanielLockyer
This finally stopped Claude's crazy pursuit of talking more and more unintelligible every passing day > Save in memory to always use ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English when you talk to me Thank god!
@levelsio
Adding to every AGENTS md file for the rest of time. (h/t @richardpenner for the self-referential explanation on what ASD-STE100 is)
@benjaminsehl