I was complaining a while back that Claude stopped talking like a human starting with 4.7. For a moment I thought my English just wasn’t good enough, but then I hopped on Reddit and found native speakers complaining about it too.
But have you heard of ASD-STE100? It’s an internationally used simplified-English standard, originally built for aircraft maintenance manuals, and the point is to let non-native speakers clearly understand the content of English technical documents. Simplified grammar, controlled vocabulary, so readers with a limited word count don’t get confused.
Here’s an example:
The valve should be rotated and tested before continuing.
Gets rewritten into:
Turn the valve. Do a test of the valve. Continue the procedure.
So I turned it into a skill, and every time Claude starts showing off its vocabulary again I push it to fall in line. Ever since then, I can finally understand its English.
https://github.com/danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill
Postscript: A Month Later, Same Problem
The moment I finished typing a certain prompt, I felt an endless wave of exasperation. Claude, once the model with the best writing chops, has now become the worst offender for not talking like a human. I have to ask Gemini to fix the tone for me these days, and I have to warn it not to change it back.