Make it readable
Ben's Bites
AI text got easier to read with two custom prompts: use Simplified Technical English and write like the reader has ADHD. It’s a small tweak, but it cuts the usual AI mush fast.
Based on reporting by Ben's Bites — read the original for the full story.
Summary, retelling and take written by AI under human oversight; images are AI-generated illustrations. How we work · Report an error
AI outputs are getting harder to read, and Ben’s Bites has found a blunt fix for that. The trick is not more detail, or softer phrasing, or the usual “I’m not technical” hand-holding that somehow makes everything worse. It’s two instructions added to custom instructions or AGENTS.md, which the newsletter says syncs anyway.
The first line is: “Always talk in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English.” That’s an actual writing standard, meant to make technical material easier to read, understand, and translate. The second is: “Always talk to me like I have ADHD.” Together, Ben says, they produce shorter bullets, clearer headers, and much less of the sludge that so often comes out of AI tools.
The point is especially useful when the AI is describing something the user built themselves. In that case, the newsletter says the result was about 10x better. But the real complaint is broader: most AI writing has become strangely hard to scan, even when it’s trying to help.
The newsletter’s answer is basically to force the model into a strict plain-English style and then make it skimmable. It’s a neat reminder that the problem is often not intelligence. It’s readability.
And that may be the most useful AI tip in the whole post: stop asking models to sound clever and start asking them to be readable.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is the sort of fix people pretend they don’t need until they try it and realise how much AI loves to pad. The industry keeps selling “helpful” assistants, then hands over prose that reads like it was generated by a committee with a caffeine problem. Clear instructions beat vague vibes, and that’s a lesson the polished demo crowd still hasn’t learned.
Read more about this at: Ben's Bites
