simple-english

simple-english is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from moeru-ai/alint. It costs 149 tokens per session (4,645 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of simple-english, MIT.

A writing guide for Simplified Technical English, a controlled form of English used in aerospace and defence manuals. It gives rules for making technical text clear, direct, and difficult to misread.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write or rewrite documentation, READMEs, runbooks, procedures, error messages, release notes, incident reports, and API guides. It can also check existing text against the guide’s rules.
Why use it?
It reduces ambiguity, long sentences, filler, and inconsistent wording in technical documents. This helps readers understand instructions correctly, including readers who are not native English speakers.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: installed under .agents/ (shared by several agents); mentions AGENTS.md; mentions Codex.

Good fit Use it to write or rewrite documentation, READMEs, runbooks, procedures, error messages, release notes, incident reports, and API guides. It can also check existing text against the guide’s rules.

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Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/moeru-ai/alint/simple-english
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.

Any agent
npx skills add moeru-ai/alint --skill simple-english
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/moeru-ai/alint

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for simple-english

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/moeru-ai/alint/simple-english/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/moeru-ai/alint/simple-english)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/moeru-ai/alint/simple-english"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/moeru-ai/alint/simple-english/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for simple-english

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/moeru-ai/alint/simple-english"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/moeru-ai/alint/simple-english.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 149 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,645 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 81% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 5.1 $0.00149 $0.04645
Opus 5 $0.00075 $0.02322
Sonnet 5 $0.00030 $0.00929
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00464

Measured 10d ago against content hash e0bf141c4a9c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

simple-english 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 10d ago.

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.

Origin

This is a copy

81% identical to simple-english — 67 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.agents/skills/simple-english/SKILL.md · 327 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 327 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Simple English: Write Like an Aerospace Manual

Write technical text with the rules of ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English. STE is the controlled language that aerospace and defense manufacturers use for maintenance documentation. The rules exist so that a tired reader who is not a native English speaker cannot misread an instruction. They remove the usual signs of AI-generated text as a side effect: long sentences, synonym rotation, hedges, filler, and decorative clauses.

Write for that tired reader. Each sentence must survive one read.

Your Task

When asked to write or rewrite technical text:

  1. Select the mode (pragmatic or strict, below).
  2. Classify each passage as procedural or descriptive. Every other rule depends on this.
  3. Fix your vocabulary before drafting. Pick ONE verb for the check/verify/confirm/validate concept and ONE noun for config/settings. Use no other word for these concepts in the whole document.
  4. Apply the rules from the catalog below.
  5. Run the self-check before you deliver. This step is not optional.
  6. Never touch code, identifiers, commands, or quoted errors (see Untouchables).

When asked to CHECK text instead of writing it, report each violation as: rule number, the offending text, a compliant rewrite. Cite only rule numbers that exist in this file. Do not cite rule numbers from memory: the numbering is unintuitive and models invent it (tested — an agent without this file cited "Rule 3.1: short sentences"; the real Rule 3.1 is about verb forms).

Two Modes

Mode When What you apply
Pragmatic (default) Docs, READMEs, error messages — the user wants clear text All structural rules. Domain words stay ("idempotent", "webhook").
Strict The user names STE, ASD-STE100, or compliance Structural rules + full vocabulary discipline, and tell the user that full compliance needs the official dictionary (free at asd-ste100.org).

Step 1: Classify the Text

Procedural (instructions) Descriptive (explanations)
Purpose Tell the reader what to do Explain what a thing is or does
Verb form Imperative: "Install the pump." Simple present/past/future
Sentence limit 20 words (Rule 5.1) 25 words (Rule 6.3)
Unit rule One instruction per sentence (5.2) One topic per paragraph (6.5), max six sentences per paragraph (6.6)

Read the full file on GitHub · 327 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 10d ago First seen · 327 lines · 149 tokens per session scan A e0bf141c4a9c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

simple-english is a skill published in the GitHub repository moeru-ai/alint (53 stars, last pushed 11d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 149 tokens to every session and 4,645 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 81% identical to simple-english, differing in 67 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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