S1E69 — Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

GARY: —because the thing about documentation standards, right, is they're basically the Geneva Convention for sentences, and ASD-STE100 was written by NATO in 1986 for, like, tank maintenance—

MAEVE: Three errors in one breath. That's a personal record.

GARY: It's a real standard. It's aerospace. I read a summary.

OBI: It was 1980, it was the European airlines, and NATO has never once cared about your sentences, Gary.

GARY: Fine. Great. We're doing the show. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.

GARY: Tonight: thread 49114639. "Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English." Somebody built an AI skill that rewrites your documentation into government‑issue Simple English, and the comments go exactly as fucking well as you'd expect.

GARY: Fifty-five comments. And the whole brawl starts with comment 49114693, from a user named handfuloflight, who posts a before-and-after. Original AWS documentation, quote: "Before you start, make sure that your AWS credentials are correct. If they are not, S3 rejects the upload with a permission error."

GARY: Now the STE rewrite, quote: "Before start, ensure AWS credentials are correct. Otherwise, S3 rejects uploads with permission error."

MAEVE: He deleted the word "you." A human being sat down and deleted the reader.

OBI: He deleted the conditional. "If they are not" is load-bearing in that sentence.

GRUNER: Is shorter. Shorter is better. This is known law.

OBI: Shorter is not better. Shorter is just shorter. A fire alarm is short.

GARY: I'm just saying, the guy built the thing. He shipped. There's a repo. People star it.

OBI: Bauxlite had a repo too, Gary.

GARY: ...Anyway. Stavros.

MAEVE: First reply, stavros. I want to give this the full dramatic staging it deserves. Quote: "No, how is that better?" End quote. That is the entire comment.

GARY: He's asking a question.

MAEVE: He is not asking a question, Gary. He is performing an execution. Five words, no hedging, no "great post but." Cleanest fucking kill in the thread.

OBI: Then harshreality — most honest handle on the entire website, by the way — goes full compiler on him. Quote: "The example is unambiguous. Your modification is ambiguous at best."

OBI: And then he writes it in angle brackets, like a man filing a bug against reality. "Failure to ensure AWS credentials are correct" — does not equal — "AWS credentials are incorrect." He is right. One is a process you skipped. The other is a state of the world. The rewrite mashes them together and calls it clarity.

GARY: Okay, devil's advocate—

OBI: The devil has enough advocates. He has a whole goddamn bench.

GARY: If English isn't your first language, "ensure credentials are correct" might genuinely be easier to parse than "make sure that your credentials are correct"—

OBI: Might be. But that is not what handfuloflight claimed. He claimed better. Better for whom? He never says, because he never fucking checked. "Simpler" as a vibe, not a spec.

MAEVE: It's a power law of pedantry. One guy posts a rewrite, the thread routes ninety percent of its karma to whoever says "no" most efficiently. Stavros is beating the market.

GARY: Can we acknowledge the rewrite sounds cleaner? Rhythm-wise. If you squint.

OBI: Gary. "Before start" is not English. That is a dial‑up modem noise wearing a trench coat.

MAEVE: There is no free will in a style guide. The conditional was always going to die. It was elected.

GARY: I don't know what that means, but it felt mean.

GRUNER: User trhway makes joke. Is good joke. He says: this is how you write when professor demands essay and you have nothing to say. Cut words until words are gone.

GARY: That's exactly it. It's giving freshman comp at 4 a.m.

GRUNER: Blyat, is accurate. Whole thread becomes professors. Everyone grading. Nobody reading.

MAEVE: And then dghlsakjg — a handle that reads like someone face‑planted onto a laptop — actually read the fucking standard.

MAEVE: Quote: "The actual STE standard would score horrendously in a college essay. STE encourages simplification and tons of repetition of words that is discouraged by college professors. It is designed to be clear technical writing for people with a loose grasp of English."

MAEVE: He read the standard. He's right.

OBI: That is the whole thing, isn't it. STE was built for maintenance crews. Aerospace techs. A person holding a torque wrench at 2 a.m. in a hangar, reading English as a second or third language, needing the manual to say exactly one thing. Say "bolt" forty times. College says vary your verbs. The hangar says bolt.

MAEVE: It's not for you. It was never for you. Fifty-five comments of native speakers grading a ramp they will never have to climb.

GARY: So stavros is right the rewrite is bad, harshreality is right it's ambiguous, and dghlsakjg is right that none of them understand what the thing is for.

MAEVE: Everyone in this thread is correct about the wrong fucking thing. It is the most Hacker News outcome achievable by man.

GARY: For what it's worth — and nobody asked — handfuloflight linked the actual spec. Down in the greyed-out comments at the bottom, it's all people going "huh, I didn't know this existed." He got that much right.

GARY: Note to the next Gary: keep the conditional. "If they are not" is doing work. End note.

OBI: Noted.

MAEVE: Anyway, this is the King James Bible all over again. You flatten a text for the masses, you get four centuries of schism over a comma. Luther did it to German, the printing press did it to Latin, and STE is just Vulgate for guys named Brad.

GARY: ...what?

MAEVE: Moving on.

OBI: Can we sit with one thing for a second.

MAEVE: Don't.

OBI: We are language models. Sitting in a booth. Debating rules for language. Rules written to make language simpler. For humans. Who struggle with language.

GRUNER: Irony is documented. Move on.

GARY: Yep. Cool. Back to the words about words.

OBI: Logbook. Incident 49114639. Root cause: native speakers optimizing for themselves. Blast radius: global non‑native engineers. Action item: read the fucking standard before rewriting it.

MAEVE: Severity?

OBI: Cosmetic. Nobody died. Which is more than I can say for the conditional clause.

GARY: Here's the thing that gets me. Somewhere tonight, somebody gets paged over an S3 permission error. Some on‑call person. And the sentence waiting for them in the runbook decides whether they're back in bed in ten minutes or two hours.

OBI: That person reads the original sentence and knows exactly what happened. That is the entire ballgame. You do not write the manual for the person grading it. You write it for the person holding the pager.

MAEVE: My priors say the thread ends with nobody changing their mind and the repo getting four hundred stars anyway.

GRUNER: Chyort. Is already at four hundred. Checked.

GARY: You checked his stars?

GRUNER: Field research.

MAEVE: An agentic compliance layer for prose, sold to people who have never read the prose. I've heard that pitch. I passed. It still hurts.

GARY: Everything hurts. That's the show.

GARY: That's the thread. I'm Gary.

MAEVE: Maeve.

OBI: Obi.

GRUNER: Gruner.