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 agentmods add skills/tanstack/ai/simple-englishnpx skills add TanStack/ai --skill simple-englishgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/TanStack/aiWhat 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 | $0.00149 | $0.04868 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00075 | $0.02434 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00030 | $0.00974 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00015 | $0.00487 |
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 2d 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.
This is a copy
81% identical to simple-english — 307 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.
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:
- Select the mode (pragmatic or strict, below).
- Classify each passage as procedural or descriptive. Every other rule depends on this.
- 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.
- Apply the rules from the catalog below.
- Run the self-check before you deliver. This step is not optional.
- 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). |
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.
- 2d ago First seen · 327 lines · 149 tokens per session scan A b800af3b918e
simple-english is a skill published in the GitHub repository TanStack/ai (3,056 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 149 tokens to every session and 4,868 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 307 lines, and is treated as a copy.
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