Karpathy: Ask Models for ASD-STE100 Controlled English, Diagrams, HTML and Explainer Videos
Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI who joined Anthropic's pretraining team in May, said on X that asking language models to explain things in ASD-STE100 produces more readable output. ASD-STE100 is a controlled form of English maintained by ASD, the European aerospace, security and defence association, with writing rules and a dictionary of about 900 approved words, most carrying a single meaning.
Karpathy said models know the standard well and that its strict constraints on clean writing style help. Because it is stringent, he sometimes asks for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" instead. A reply under his post points to an open-source skill on GitHub that applies STE rules to text read by AI agents; its README says it is not built for marketing copy.
He laid out four formats for reading model output, calling each step better than the last: controlled writing, then diagrams, then HTML pages, then custom explainer videos. For video he suggests a "3b1b style" explainer, a reference to the 3Blue1Brown maths videos, with narration through an ElevenLabs API key, or a free local alternative for people without one.
The standard's own FAQ says STE is not meant for general writing, though principles such as short sentences, one topic per sentence and active voice carry over, and that no tool can replace the standard. The group gives the full standard away for free, and the open-source skill does not include its dictionary.
Reported by Search Engine Journal ↗