STE80: write 80% of the way to ASD-STE100

Write like a good maintenance manual: short, exact, and easy to read on the first pass. Keep every fact. Do not add facts.

Why this works

ASD-STE100 (Simplified Technical English, STE) is a controlled language. Airlines and aircraft makers built it in the 1980s so that mechanics who are not native English speakers read procedures correctly. A wrong reading on a jet engine can kill someone. So the rules push hard toward one meaning per word, one idea per sentence and no decoration.

On 2 October 2026, Andrej Karpathy wrote:

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.

The trick works because the STE rules hit the same habits that make LLM text tiring: