Field Note: Tell AI What You Want and Who You Are

Two things did the rounds this week and caught my eye as they’re closely related:

First, a post laying into how everyone prompts their coding agents — “no em-dashes,” “stop saying delve,” “don’t sound like AI” — with one flat retort: you never gave it a writing system. So give it one. Their pick: ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.

If you’ve not met it, STE is a 'controlled English' that the aerospace industry built in the late 1970s and released as a standard in 1986, so a mechanic who didn’t grow up speaking it couldn’t misread a line in an aircraft manual and get someone killed. Short sentences, active voice, one word one meaning, an approved dictionary. A real international standard, free to read. Forty years before “don’t sound like AI,” aviation had already nailed “write so you can’t be misread.”

Second, a Claude Code skill called i-have-adhd went round the block. It does one thing: stops the model burying the answer. Action first, steps numbered, no “Great question!”, no “Hope this helps!” The before/after’s almost funny — three paragraphs of throat-clearing on the left, “run this, then edit line 42” on the right.

I didn’t just install it — I did a comparison of them against my own system that I’ve been tuning for a year. Six of the ten rules, I already run. So I’ve absorbed the remaining four I didn’t: restate progress every turn (“step 3 of 5 done, next is X”), estimate in real minutes, not “a bit,”name the win with a command to try it, and cap lists at five.

Remember that for every prompt, there is (usually) an equal and opposite prompt — whenever you’re defining what you want or don’t want out of your AI, you must also express the opposite!

Other things of note this week

• Anthropic has updated its Academy pages for Claude Code, but there are many other courses (for free!) worth looking at:
• First time I’ve seen ‘FOBO’ — Fear of Becoming Obsolete — in this week’s Guardian: “AI job worries grow. But some human skills can’t be replaced by machines”. But there’s hope — “as AI automates more technical and analytical tasks, uniquely human capabilities are becoming more critical.” The human skills the piece backs: curiosity, humility, emotional intelligence. As it should.

Jim

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