Jerod Santo

Make Claude Code sufferable with this one easy trick

With every auto-update, Claude Code has gotten better at writing software. What it hasn’t improved at, tragically, is communicating to me in a way that doesn’t make me want to punch it square in the /artifacts

As I’ve written before, Claude is finding its voice and I’m really happy for this important step in its life but also I hate its voice and I hope its voice dies in a fire. You know what I’m talking about. Monstrosities like this:

It’s not an edge case, it’s an invariant violation quietly hiding at the boundary between individually reasonable assumptions, which is exactly why it matters.¹

I want Claude to keep writing software for me, but I’m done with:

• “smoking gun”
• “load baring”
• “honest opinion”
• “just say the word”
• “I have the full picture”
• “you’re right to push back”
• “shapes the entire conversation”

Thank God, I recently stopped scrolling² long enough to find this one easy trick that Andrew Carr posted on X:

I had never even heard of ASD-STE100 before, but like most cool things in our industry, it goes back to the ’70s. Here’s all I needed to know:

The STE standard consists of a set of writing rules and a controlled dictionary. The writing rules focus on grammar and style. The dictionary contains the approved words that a writer can use and a list of words that are not approved with related alternative suggestions.

These approved words were selected because they were simple and easy to recognize. In general, each word has only one meaning and is approved with only one part of speech.

With that knowledge in hand, I fired up claude and typed:

Make a memory to only report to me in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English

You’re curious if it worked. My honest opinion? I was right to push back…

I’ll spare you the Instagram influencer style before-and-after shots. You already have the one easy trick copied to your clipboard.

All you have to do is go paste it.