ste

A writing guide for Simplified Technical English, a controlled style for clear technical instructions. It uses short, direct sentences, consistent terms, active voice, and explicit conditions.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write or rewrite documentation, procedures, and other technical text in files or GitHub posts. It does not change code, commands, identifiers, paths, or quoted text.
Why use it?
It reduces ambiguity so readers are less likely to interpret technical instructions in different ways. It also marks information that is missing instead of hiding the gap with vague wording.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/mifunedev/openharness/ste
Any agent
npx skills add mifunedev/openharness --skill ste
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/mifunedev/openharness

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 154 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,590 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00154 $0.02590
Opus 5 $0.00077 $0.01295
Sonnet 5 $0.00031 $0.00518
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00259

Measured 3d ago against content hash 4715d9635d0f, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ste scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/ste-check.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.oh/skills/ste/SKILL.md · 273 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 273 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

STE — Simplified Technical English

Write prose that one reader resolves one way. Apply this skill to any text that lands in a git-tracked file or a GitHub-posted body.

Status and affiliation

This skill claims no ASD-STE100 certification and no complete standards compliance. STEMG publishes and maintains ASD-STE100. STEMG neither endorses nor certifies this skill. The authoritative standard lives at https://www.asd-ste100.org/.

This skill follows the published shape of that standard: a set of writing rules plus a controlled vocabulary. Every rule statement and every word entry here carries our own wording. This skill reproduces no text from ASD-STE100 Issue 9 and no entry from its controlled dictionary. Read the standard itself when you need the standard itself.

Priority order

Apply these in order. A longer sentence wins when the longer sentence removes ambiguity.

  1. Technical correctness — the text must state what the software does.
  2. Unambiguous meaning — one reading, not two.
  3. Consistent terminology — one term per concept, everywhere.
  4. Explicit sequencing — the reader knows what comes first.
  5. Concision — cut what carries no information.

Never simplify these

Copy each of the following byte for byte. Rewriting any of them breaks the text:

  • code blocks and inline code
  • commands, flags, and arguments
  • API names, function names, and symbol names
  • filenames, directory names, and paths
  • identifiers, environment-variable names, and configuration keys
  • error strings, log lines, and quoted literals
  • numbers, units, versions, and exit codes

Never trade technical meaning for a shorter sentence.

Never invent a missing value

When the source omits a value, do not supply one. Mark the gap with an angle-bracket placeholder, then raise the question:

Restart it after a while.
Restart <component> after <duration>.

Ask the author for <component> and <duration>. A guessed duration reads as fact and survives every later edit.

Read the full file on GitHub · 273 lines

Files

What ships with it

4 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 273 lines · 154 tokens per session scan A 4715d9635d0f

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ste is a skill published in the GitHub repository mifunedev/openharness (36 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 154 tokens to every session and 2,590 once invoked, about $0.0008 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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