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.
npx skills add PostHog/posthog-foss --skill writing-simplified-technical-englishgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PostHog/posthog-fossWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/posthog/posthog-foss/writing-simplified-technical-english)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/posthog/posthog-foss/writing-simplified-technical-english"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/posthog/posthog-foss/writing-simplified-technical-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.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/posthog/posthog-foss/writing-simplified-technical-english"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/posthog/posthog-foss/writing-simplified-technical-english.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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.
| Model | Per session | Once invoked |
|---|---|---|
| Fable 5.1 | $0.00145 | $0.01061 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00072 | $0.00531 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00029 | $0.00212 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00015 | $0.00106 |
Grade A, and why
writing-simplified-technical-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 9d 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.
Copies of this mod
1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:
- writing-simplified-technical-english — 100% identical, 0 lines differ
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 81 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Writing simplified technical English
ASD-STE100 is a controlled-language standard. The aerospace and defense industry wrote it so that a technician cannot misread a maintenance instruction. It removes the two biggest sources of misreading: words that carry more than one meaning, and sentences that support more than one structure.
The same discipline fixes the usual failure of agent-written prose. Agent output is often correct and unreadable: long sentences, stacked hedges, passive voice, and a synonym rotation that makes one action look like three. The reader has no author to ask, so ambiguity costs them a re-read at best and a wrong action at worst.
Apply the rules below as you write. Do not write a dense draft and clean it up afterward.
When to use this
Use it for text that a person or another agent must act on:
- Reports, findings, and summaries.
- PR descriptions, commit messages, and code comments.
- Instructions passed to another agent, and prompts.
- Tool descriptions, error messages, empty states, and log lines.
Do not use it where voice is the point: marketing copy, blog posts, or anything persuasive. STE is deliberately flat. Also leave quoted text alone. If you quote a user, a log, or a document, quote it as it is.
The rules
| Rule | Do | Do not |
|---|---|---|
| One meaning per word | Pick one verb per action and reuse it every time | Rotate "check", "verify", and "confirm" for the same action |
| One part of speech per word | "Apply oil to the valve" | "Oil the valve" |
| Active voice | "The worker deletes the file." | "The file is deleted." |
| Simple tenses | "We received the report." | "We have received the report." |
| One idea per sentence | "Open the file. Read line 3." | "Open the file and read line 3, then check it matches." |
| Sentence length | 20 words or fewer for instructions, 25 or fewer for descriptions | Chains of subordinate clauses |
| Noun clusters | 3 words or fewer ("fuel pump valve") | "high pressure fuel pump inlet valve assembly" |
| No missing words | Keep the subject, the verb, and the article, even if it reads longer | "Files not backed up will be lost", which hides which files |
| One hedge, at most | "The client version is probably out of date." | "An error may have occurred which could be caused by..." |
| Paragraphs | One topic, 6 sentences or fewer | Multi-topic paragraphs |
| Lists | Use a list for 3 or more steps or conditions | A sequence buried in one sentence |
| Jargon | Keep the technical term you need, and define it once | Use an internal name the reader has never seen |
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.
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.
- 9d ago First seen · 81 lines · 145 tokens per session scan A e51531ad5db7
writing-simplified-technical-english is a skill published in the GitHub repository PostHog/posthog-foss (715 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 145 tokens to every session and 1,061 once invoked, about $0.0007 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 2026-09-03.
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