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STE80 Humanizer
STE80 Humanizer makes AI-written text read like a careful person wrote it, without changing what it says. It combines two methods:
The humanizer method. Remove the 26 tells from Wikipedia's Signs of AI writing , in the catalog of blader/humanizer .
Karpathy's STE80 method. Rebuild the sentences "80% of the way to ASD-STE100", the controlled English of aircraft maintenance manuals.
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The goal is text that people read easily. Getting past AI detectors is not a goal.
Why two passes
Most humanizers only remove phrases. The text loses "Great question!" and "seamless", but it keeps long sentences that carry three ideas, hide the actor and stack hedges. It still reads like AI. You can see it in the worked example in SKILL.md :
The method: what Karpathy said
On 2 October 2026, Andrej Karpathy posted tips for one problem: as LLMs do more of the work, people spend more time reading and understanding what the models produce. His first tip:
Ask your LLM to explain something in ASD-STE100, it's a controlled language specification originally developed for aerospace maintenance documentation. LLMs well-versed in this language and it comes with heavy constraints on clean writing style that I often find a lot more readable. Sometimes I've tried to soften it a bit e.g. ask for "80% of the way to ASD-STE100" because the spec is quite stringent.
The post then goes up a ladder: diagrams, then HTML pages, then explainer videos. His conclusion is that our work moves "up the abstractions into oversight and understanding". Clear output is the bottleneck, and writing is the first step.
The STE overview graphic from Karpathy's post . Click to enlarge. Note: a later fact check found errors in the dictionary panel (D). In ASD-STE100 Issue 9, "approximately" is approved, "TEST" is approved only as a noun (not as a verb), and there is no entry for "in order to". This skill follows Issue 9.
ASD-STE100 (Simplified Technical English) is from the 1980s aerospace industry. It was made for mechanics whose first language is not English, because a misread step on an aircraft can kill. Its rules:
20 words per instruction and 25 per description
active voice and simple tenses
one meaning per word, with about 900 approved words
one topic per paragraph, and six sentences at most
Why "80%"? At 100%, "check" and "test" are nouns only, "may" and "should" are banned and many common words are not allowed. Normal prose sounds stiff. At 80%, you keep the full structure and only as much vocabulary as still sounds natural:
Karpathy's tip is about readability. It does not remove chatbot phrases, so Pass 1 does that first.
How to read the skill
§1 to §26: the AI tells (Pass 1).
S1 to S15: the STE80 structure rules (Pass 2).
Both lists are compact tables with a short example. Pass 2 says what changes between 80% and Strict . The full entries, with Watch for , Problem , Before and After , are in references/ai-tells.md and references/ste80-rules.md . Weak alone means: act only if other tells are near. The skill reports its edits by number, for example "§1, §8, S2", so you can look each one up.
Installation
Once installed, the skill answers to /ste80-humanizer . It also starts by itself when you ask to humanize, simplify or de-AI a text, or ask for STE.
Any agent (skills.sh)
npx skills add Dodaios/ste80-humanizer
Global install for one agent, or for all of them:
npx skills add Dodaios/ste80-humanizer --global --agent claude-code npx skills add Dodaios/ste80-humanizer --global --agent codex npx skills add Dodaios/ste80-humanizer --global --agent cursor npx skills add Dodaios/ste80-humanizer --global --agent ' * '
Without --global , the skill goes into the current project only. The skills CLI from Vercel works with Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode and many more agents.
Claude Code plugin
/plugin marketplace add Dodaios/ste80-humanizer /plugin install ste80-humanizer@ste80-humanizer
Claude.ai and Claude Desktop
Download this repo as a ZIP (Code → Download ZIP). Upload it in Settings → Capabilities → Skills.
Usage
/ste80-humanizer <paste text>
This sounds like ChatGPT wrote it. Make it sound like a person. Rewrite this README 80% of the way to ASD-STE100. Explain how TLS handshakes work in STE. Light touch: just remove the AI stuff from docs/intro.md. Convert docs/runbook.md to strict STE. Does this email sound like AI? Just tell me, don't rewrite it.
Match your voice. Add a sample of your own writing. The skill then matches your sentence length, words and punctuation.
Fidelity first. The skill keeps every fact, keeps "may" as "may", keeps "40+" as "40+", adds nothing and flags contradictions in the source. In our tests, this was the clearest difference from a plain prompt (see Tests).
Pass 1: the 26 AI tells
Pass 2: the 15 STE80 rules
More examples: references/ste80-rules.md . Full strict rules and a checklist: references/strict-mode.md . More than 100 plain-word swaps: references/word-swaps.md .
Checker
scripts/ste_check.py is a small Python linter with no dependencies. It flags many Pass 1 tells, such as not-X-but-Y, chatbot phrases, run-ups, fake depth, stacked hedges, vague authority and association, "-ing" riders, inflated claims, AI words, hyphen pairs and curly quotes. It also flags the measurable Pass 2 rules: sentence and paragraph length, semicolons, dashes, passive voice, perfect and progressive tenses, "-ing" forms and phrasal verbs.
python scripts/ste_check.py README.md python scripts/ste_check.py --strict docs/runbook.md cat draft.txt | python scripts/ste_check.py -
It is a heuristic, not an AI detector and not a compliance checker.
Tests
evals/ has four cases in the claude plugin eval format: a README rewrite, an explanation from scratch, a strict runbook and a casual LinkedIn post that does not mention STE. Run them with claude plugin eval . --allow-tools Write,Edit,Bash .
What we saw: when the prompt names ASD-STE100, the base model already gets the style mostly right. The skill made the difference in fidelity. In the LinkedIn rewrite, the run without the skill invented a quote and changed "40+ customers" to "40-odd". The run with the skill kept every fact. In the README rewrite, it kept "you may need to" and flagged a contradiction in the source. These are small tests, so treat them as a hint, not proof.
Limits
STE is for clear explanatory text. For fiction, speeches and brand copy, the skill does Pass 1 only.
STE is an English standard. For other languages, the skill applies the tells and the structure rules, but not the English word lists.
"STE style" is not "STE compliant." Compliance needs the official dictionary, trained writers and review.
Sources and credits
Andrej Karpathy on X, 2 October 2026: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2105819303471976479
ASD-STE100 Issue 9 (2025): https://www.asd-ste100.org
Wikipedia, Signs of AI writing (WikiProject AI Cleanup)
blader/humanizer by Siqi Chen (MIT). Pass 1 follows its 26-pattern catalog and order, with new examples. Its license notice is in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md .
Hacker News discussion of STE skills (July 2026): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639
Disclaimer
This skill does not contain the ASD-STE100 specification or its dictionary. The STE rules are paraphrased and simplified. ASD-STE100 and Simplified Technical English are trademarks of ASD (AeroSpace, Security and Defence Industries Association of Europe). This project is not affiliated with or endorsed by ASD.
License
About
STE80 Humanizer: agent skill that removes AI tells and rewrites text 80% of the way to ASD-STE100 (Simplified Technical English), the method Andrej Karpathy shared.