Writing · Checked 4 August 2026

SimpleEnglish: Give agents stricter technical-writing rules

Rewrite technical instructions with controlled English rules.

SimpleEnglish is an agent skill that adapts ASD-STE100 controlled-English rules for software documentation, runbooks, errors, and release notes.

Type
skill
Works on
Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, ChatGPT

Open SimpleEnglish ↗︎

Aircraft writing rules for software work

SimpleEnglish packages controlled-English rules inspired by ASD-STE100 as an installable agent skill. The standard grew from aviation maintenance work, where manufacturers needed technical instructions that readers could not easily interpret in two different ways.

The skill applies that approach to software documentation. It limits sentence length, uses one term for one meaning, puts conditions before commands, and favours direct instructions. The repository includes versions for agents that support SKILL.md plus a plain system prompt for other chat tools.

Try it on one risky procedure

Install it with the documented Skills CLI command, or paste the supplied prompt into your agent. Give it a deployment rollback, credential setup, or recovery procedure and ask for a rewrite. Compare the result line by line with the original: every prerequisite should appear before the action it controls, and each instruction should contain one clear operation.

The repository publishes a 96-run author evaluation and before-and-after examples. Treat those as project evidence, not an independent guarantee. The skill also says its flat style is deliberately wrong for marketing and brand writing, so use it where ambiguity matters more than voice.

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