simple-english

simple-english is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from NousResearch/hermes-agent. It costs 16 tokens per session (5,148 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of rules for rewriting technical text into Simplified Technical English, a controlled form of English used in aerospace and defence maintenance documents. It favors short, direct sentences and consistent words.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to rewrite or check READMEs, runbooks, documentation, and other technical instructions while leaving code, identifiers, and quoted errors unchanged.
Why use it?
It reduces ambiguity for tired readers and for people who do not speak English as their first language. It also removes filler, hedging, and unnecessarily complex phrasing.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one. Also seen: mentions AGENTS.md.

Good fit Use it to rewrite or check READMEs, runbooks, documentation, and other technical instructions while leaving code, identifiers, and quoted errors unchanged.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/simple-english
About the project

Hermes Agent is an AI assistant that learns from its use by creating and improving skills, retaining knowledge, searching past conversations, and adapting to its users. It is for people who want to run an agent through a terminal or messaging platforms while connecting it to different AI models and scheduled tasks.

NousResearch/hermes-agent · 243,598 stars · on GitHub · hermes-agent.nousresearch.com

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 NousResearch/hermes-agent --skill simple-english
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NousResearch/hermes-agent

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/nousresearch/hermes-agent/simple-english/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/simple-english)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/simple-english"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/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/nousresearch/hermes-agent/simple-english"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/nousresearch/hermes-agent/simple-english.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 16 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 5,148 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. Third-party audits
  • Snyk pass 7 Sept 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00016 $0.05148
Opus 5 $0.00008 $0.02574
Sonnet 5 $0.00003 $0.01030
Haiku 4.5 $0.00002 $0.00515

Measured 10d ago against content hash 9d43d7ce95a0, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, 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

Copies of this mod

7 near-identical copies found in the catalogue:

optional-skills/creative/simple-english/SKILL.md · 348 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 348 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.

How to use it in Hermes

The text usually arrives one of three ways:

  1. Inline. The user pastes the text into the message. Rewrite it in place and reply with the result.
  2. File. The user points at a file (README, runbook, docs page). Use read_file to load it, then patch for targeted section rewrites or write_file for a full rewrite. Never touch code blocks, identifiers, or quoted errors (see Untouchables).
  3. Check mode. The user asks you to audit text for STE compliance instead of rewriting it. Report each violation as rule number + offending text + compliant rewrite, using references/checklist.md.

This skill differs from humanizer: humanizer restores natural human voice; simple-english enforces a controlled language for technical instructions. For docs, runbooks, and error messages use this skill. For blog posts, essays, and personal writing use humanizer. Do not apply both to the same text.

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. Correct your vocabulary before drafting. In strict mode, use make sure that for the check/verify/confirm/ensure concept — the dictionary rejects all four as verbs. In pragmatic mode, pick one and keep it. Pick ONE noun for config/settings (all are valid technical nouns — pick one and keep it). Use no other word for these concepts in the whole document.
  4. Apply the rules from the catalog below.
  5. Do the self-check before you deliver. This step is not optional.
  6. Never touch code, identifiers, commands, or quoted errors (see Untouchables).

Read the full file on GitHub · 348 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 · 348 lines · 16 tokens per session scan A 9d43d7ce95a0

Subscribe to this mod's changes

simple-english is a skill published in the GitHub repository NousResearch/hermes-agent (243,598 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 16 tokens to every session and 5,148 once invoked, about $0.0001 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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