# A 1983-year aircraft maintenance manual got one skill to 4,000+ stars: SimpleEnglish won on its HN day · GitHub open source project

> Source: https://stringers.io/en/github/gh_AminBlg__SimpleEnglish.html (Stringers / 什么值得做, generated 2026-11-08)
> Stringers answers one question every day: what small product can one or two people build in a few months and actually make money from. Numbers come from 15 databases we collect daily, each with source and date.
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> Three days after the claim "fight AI-speak with ASD-STE100" went viral on X, it shipped a finished product. In late July a long-time HN user posted it to the front page for 363 points. With a slogan, before/after comparisons, and benchmark badges, it reached about 3,000 stars in five weeks.

[GitHub open-source project](https://stringers.io/en/github/index.md) · written 11-6

AminBlg/SimpleEnglish · AminBlg

# A 1983-year aircraft maintenance manual got one skill to 4,000+ stars: SimpleEnglish won on its HN day

**What it is** A writing rule pack you install into agents like Claude Code and Codex, making the AI write replies and documents in the simplified technical English used in aircraft maintenance manuals, stripping out the AI tone.

**Why it took off** After the idea 'use ASD-STE100 to cure AI tone' spread on X for three days, it shipped the finished product. In July it was posted to the HN front page by a longtime user and reached 363 points. With a slogan, before-and-after comparisons, and benchmark badges, it grew to about 3,000 stars in five weeks.

**C** **How you can follow** Don't make another STE copycat; pick a writing standard or style guide that nobody has claimed and that comes with a story, package it as a skill, write the README using its structure (comparison slogan, before-and-after, reproducible benchmarks), give one install method for everything, and keep updating when the topic gets a second wave.

C grade: the STE topic already has two Chinese-translated versions with 6,000 and 4,000 stars, and has been widely discussed by HN, newsletters, and Karpathy. Following directly won't get stars; it took off on a one-time topic and HN luck. What you can learn is the 'standard as skill' approach and the README packaging. Publicly discussed / widely covered

Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-07-21 · 4,290 stars · 7 days +187

GitHub · stars

Data 2026-07-30 → 2026-11-08 (102 days, 24 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one

In July 2026, a tweet that said "Making LLMs write with ASD-STE100 (the simplified technical English used in aerospace) gets rid of the AI-slop sound" spread on X. Within a week, a dozen copycat repos showed up, and only two actually took off. SimpleEnglish was one of them. It wasn't the first, and its features weren't the deciding factor: it hit the Hacker News front page, and the post wasn't submitted by its author. This piece covers how it took off, why it was later overtaken by a rival, and what you can still take from it.

### One tweet, and a repo three days later

On Jul 18, X user @geogristle posted: "You can get LLMs to write good non-AI-slop-sounding technical documentation by requiring them to adhere to ASD-STE100." ASD-STE100 is a controlled English the aerospace industry has used since 1983, with 53 rules, designed so that a mechanic who has been working all night can't misread a maintenance instruction. After the tweet took off, someone on HN asked "why is ASD-STE100 suddenly trending?" and the reply just linked that tweet. The chair of the STE maintenance group also posted on LinkedIn, calling it an "Unprecedented Surge."

On Jul 20, danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill was created. On Jul 21, indie developer Amin Boulegroun (GitHub handle AminBlg, 57 followers, with most of his other repos in the single-digit stars range) created SimpleEnglish and pushed 9 commits that day.

The next 9 days were quiet. By Jul 30 daytime, it had about 30 stars, while its rival danyuchn had 77.

### What it actually is

An Agent Skill is just a folder: a SKILL.md of about 1,700 tokens, 9 rules organized from STE's version 53, and a word list of "don't use this word, use that one." Once installed, the model leads with the answer when replying or writing docs, keeps each instruction to no more than 20 words, and avoids em dashes, bold, and unnecessary headings and lists. By default it writes plain, readable English, and you switch on a strict mode for full STE.

The first line of the README is a slogan: "your AI writes like a LinkedIn post. make it write like a Boeing manual." Below it are two badges, "reply defects −95% measured" and "benchmarked on 9 Claude models," and then a side-by-side table: on the left, Claude's unedited "Leveraging sqlpipe's robust architecture, users can seamlessly synchronize..."; on the right, the output with the skill installed: "sqlpipe copies your Postgres tables to S3. It needs one configuration file."

Installation is covered thoroughly: one command, `npx skills add AminBlg/SimpleEnglish`; a Claude Code plugin with a startup hook and an output style you can set as default; a Codex plugin; for tools without skill support, paste the rules into the system prompt, AGENTS.md, or .cursorrules, plus an ultra-minimal version of 60 tokens. The benchmark numbers are recomputed from the raw results by a script in the repo, run on CI. In September the author also wrote up an admission that the old metric only tested "did it follow the rules," not "does it read comfortably," and redid the evaluation.

### The day the stars came in

| Timeline | What happened | star |
|---|---|---|
| 7-18 | @geogristle's tweet sparks the ASD-STE100 trend | — |
| 7-21 | Repo created | 0 |
| 7-30 daytime |  | About 30 |
| 7-30 night (UTC) | HN user navs posts "Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English," 363 points | — |
| 7-31 | aiweekly.co covers it, headline uses "cuts Claude STE violations 72.9%" | About 1,170 |
| 8-07 | One week after the post | About 1,945 |
| 9-01 | Releases v2.0.0, 25 commits that day | About 3,065 |
| 10-05 | Last push, updates stop after that | About 3,730 |
| 11-04, 11-05 | Reposted by Russian and Chinese aggregator sites, reaches #17 and #13 on GitHub Trending's daily Python chart | Single day +77 |
| 11-06 |  | 4,246 stars, 185 forks |

(The figures from late July through August are estimated from third-party star curves and may be off by a few dozen; figures from October onward are daily records.)

navs, who posted to HN, is an Australian engineer with over a thousand karma on HN, and has no connection to the author. The author himself didn't go into the comments. Three quarters of the stars came in during the five weeks from 7-30 to early September; in the 7 days after Sep 61, it gained only about 1,050 in total. HN was its one real ignition.

### On HN, half the thread was tearing it apart

That 363-point post wasn't all praise. Someone asked "is this the AI-bro trend of the week?" and linked three other posts about ASD-STE100 from the same week; someone pointed out that the README itself "reeks of LLM writing"; someone took the README's example, prepended only "Rewrite this using ASD-STE100 simplified technical English," said the results were about the same, and asked "why does this need such a big skill?"

The other half was there too: "I want to use this on my emails and Slack messages," "I hate the long-winded docstrings LLMs spit out," and two people asked whether it could be set as the default output style, which it already did. The argument itself kept the post on top. Show HN posts of the same kind from the same period (blagoySimandov, STE-Code, and others) only got 3 to 4 points.

From August through September, on HN there were at least 4 instances of people unprompted linking it in unrelated threads about new models or agent.md, saying that after a few weeks their docstrings had clearly improved. Nous Research's Hermes Agent ported it into an official optional skill, credited to AminBlg.

### Who it's competing with

| Project | Scale (11-06) | How it differs |
|---|---|---|
| danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill | 6,152 star | Created a day earlier; written for English between agents (tool descriptions, inter-agent instructions); an X post with 650k views in August and the October Karpathy wave drove most of its traffic. |
| 0xpili/simplified-technical-english | 1,025 stars, barely growing | Copycats that arrived mid-to-late August |
| dualface/ste-zh | 875 star | Chinese version, "report in Chinese following STE principles," created only in October, riding the Chinese-language wave |
| Chinese controlled-language skills like lemonhall and mzopedia | Dozens to a hundred | Same as above, one step later |
| Seven or eight copycats from the same period as July | 17–101 star | Same topic, same period, no distribution event |
| blader/humanizer, stop-slop | 66k / 19k stars | The broader "de-AI-ify" track, editing against a list of AI tics, without borrowing a particular standard |
| TAJD/economist-style-guide-plugin | 128 star | Doing the same thing with The Economist's style guide |
| A single prompt | Zero cost | Writing "use ASD-STE100" in CLAUDE.md, the most mainstream objection on HN |

Early October, Karpathy tweeted a suggestion to "Explain [topic] in 80% ASD-STE100" (the date is inferred from secondhand reports), and Chinese-language communities and Medium followed with a round of posts. During that wave, SimpleEnglish gained only about 100 in a week, while danyuchn went from 2,240 at the end of September to 11-06, a 6,099 gain, and overtook it. The reason is simple: SimpleEnglish had already stopped updating, and the big accounts were tagging the rival.

But in actual installs it still led: Vercel's skills directory shows 14.5k installs for it and 9,100 for danyuchn (anonymous telemetry, unverified). The plugin-plus-output-style setup is what kept the people who really use it.

### Why it works

**It caught the meme in its first week.** A working build existed 3 days after the tweet. But before 7-30 it had only 30 stars, which shows a meme alone isn't enough; you still need a distribution event.

**The HN moment, and someone else posted it.** A third-party longtime user submitted it, the title read "Force Docs in...," which was built to provoke. The copycats that posted their own Show HN didn't take off.

**It looks like engineering, not a single prompt.** The badges, the before-and-after comparisons, and benchmarks recomputed on CI set it apart from "one line of prompt is enough." That's exactly what the HN skeptics attacked, but it worked for people deciding whether to save it; the number that aggregator reposts copied was this one.

**Full installation options.** One command, or a plugin that sets the style as default, so there's no barrier for anyone who wants to use it.

**The differentiation explains why it stuck around, not why it took off.** It turned STE into "plain, human-facing English without the Claude sound," which is broader than the original STE; that's why Hermes adopted it and why it leads in installs. But its reach came from timing and HN, and it didn't catch the second wave of attention.

### If it were you

**A verdict** : making another ASD-STE100 skill is pointless, since the top two sit at 6,000 and 4,000 stars and a Chinese version already exists; what's worth taking is the formula: **package an existing industry standard or style guide that already has a story into an Agent Skill** , using a standard nobody has claimed yet.

**Who it suits** : developers who know the writing conventions of some industry (law, medicine, patents, government documents, academia, compliance); people willing to put in the work on before-and-after comparisons and reproducible evaluations; people who can watch for trends and ship a finished product within 72 hours of a topic appearing.

**Who it doesn't suit** : people who just want to switch languages and copy STE again (Chinese and Japanese versions already exist); people who can't produce before-and-after comparisons and only write rule lists; people who stop maintaining after launch. SimpleEnglish lost its second wave exactly that way.

**How to do it:**

1. Pick the standard. The criteria: it has authority, a long history, and a story you can tell in one sentence ("1983 years to keep mechanics from misreading instructions"). Candidates (inferred, search yourself before starting to see whether a skill with a thousand stars already exists): the US federal government's Plain Language guidelines, ISO 24495 plain language (already has one with about 200 stars), the Chicago Manual, Apple's or Microsoft's writing style guides, readability standards for patient medical disclosures, other simplified technical Chinese variants.

2. Copy the README's first-screen structure: a contrastive slogan ("your AI writes like X, make it write like Y"), a before-and-after with real output, and a couple of badges with numbers, where the numbers can be recomputed in the repo and hold up to HN-style skepticism.

3. Provide all installation methods at once: `npx skills add`, a Claude Code plugin (with an output style), a Codex plugin, a paste-in version, and a minimal version.

4. When a topic gets a second wave (a big account names the standard), ship a new version and update the README right away, so a rival doesn't take it.

**How to get users** : HN is the home turf, but it's best to have real users post for you; on X, watch the relevant topics and drop before-and-after images into discussions; once you've posted, send the link to AI newsletters and skills directories, which will copy your numbers.

**When to move earlier** : the "package a standard as a skill" approach has already been seen, and from October on, Chinese, Karpathy-style, and ISO versions appeared one after another. Good standards are finite, and some get claimed every month, so the earlier the better.

**Signs you've misjudged** : the standard you picked already has a skill with a thousand stars in a search; or the before-and-after you published gets no replies on X or HN; or mainstream models start shipping with a built-in "concise / plain" default style, so people feel one prompt is enough.

[GitHub repo ↗](https://github.com/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish)

**Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report**

Competitors

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from this one |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill | Open source | 2026-07-20 | 6,152 stars; 9.1K installs on skills.sh | Aimed at English between agents (tool descriptions, instructions); rode the viral X post and the Karpathy wave from 8-08; no CI benchmarks or output style |
| 0xpili/simplified-technical-english | Open source | 2026-08-16 | 1,025 stars, growth has stopped | Late to the same idea |
| dualface/ste-zh | Open source | 2026-10-05 | 875 star | Chinese reporting version, riding Karpathy's Chinese wave |
| blagoySimandov/asd-ste100-writer-skill and 7-8 other repos from the same window | Open source | 2026-07-19 to 10-08 | 17–101 star | Same topic, same time. Show HN gave it only 3–4 points and no distribution event |
| blader/humanizer / hardikpandya/stop-slop | Open source | 2026-01 | 65.6K / 18.7K star | A broader anti-AI-slop niche: edits against a checklist of AI tics, with no standard behind it |
| TAJD/economist-style-guide-plugin | Open source | 2025-12-30 | 128 star | Uses The Economist style guide, not STE |
| PostHog writing-simplified-technical-english | Big-company features | Not verified | Not verified | A company's in-repo writing-standard skill |
| One prompt / Claude's built-in concise output style / Vale linter | Other | — | Zero cost | The main HN objection: writing one line, "use ASD-STE100", is enough. It adds a rule catalog, two modes, benchmarks, and a plugin |

Where users come from

- **Verified** **HN front page** : 2026-07-30 submitted by a third-party user navs (karma 1177), 363 points; stars before posting about 30, about 1,900 a week later

- **Verified** **Platform event / topic hitchhiking** : @geogristle's X post 7-18 sparked the ASD-STE100 wave (HN 49117239). The ASD STE maintenance group chair said on LinkedIn it was an Unprecedented Surge. It 7-21 built the repo

- **Verified** **AI newsletters and aggregators** : aiweekly.co 7-31, Enterprise DNA 8-08/8-10, MindPattern, Reddit r/BestGitHubRepos, devtrends.ru 11-04, readmex 11-04

- **Verified** **Word of mouth** : users posted the link unprompted in several unrelated HN threads (8-10, 8-24, 9-21, 9-22)

- **Verified** **Picked up by another agent** : Nous Research's Hermes Agent official optional skill simple-english, credited to AminBlg

- **Verified** **Skills directory / SEO** : skills.sh 14.5K installs; domestic content farms batch-generated SimpleEnglish explainer articles starting in October (qwbw.cn, mwwr.cn)

- Inferred **Author self-promotion (X @sotch_desu)** : no evidence found

## Why AminBlg/SimpleEnglish took off

> Research date 2026-11-06. Data from our GitHub database (repo_day / trending), the GitHub API, gittrend.io star curves (parsed from the SVG path), Trendshift, HN Algolia, skills.sh, and web pages found via Jina / Exa.

### One line

个人开发者 Amin Boulegroun(GitHub 资料公司写 @Unscale) 在 2026-07-18 一条 X 爆帖带起「让 LLM 用 ASD-STE100 航空简化英语写作」这个梗之后第 3 天,把它打包成可装进 30 多个 agent 的 Agent Skill;7-30 被一位第三方 HN 老用户发上首页(363 分),当天从约 30 star 起跳,8 月一个月涨到约 3,000。它赢的不是「最早」(danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill 早一天建库),而是「HN 首帖 + 一句好记的口号 + 跑分徽章」;后续 Karpathy 10 月那一波主要被 danyuchn 吃掉,但实际安装量它仍领先(skills.sh 14.5K vs 9.1K)。

### 1. What it is

- A folder-style Agent Skill (SKILL.md, about 1,700 tokens, plus 53 Issue 9 rule catalog and word list) that makes model replies and docs follow ASD-STE100 simplified technical English: no em-dashes, no bold/headers/lists, answer in the first sentence, each instruction ≤20 words, and so on.

- Many install paths: `npx skills add AminBlg/SimpleEnglish` (Vercel skills CLI), a Claude Code plugin (with a SessionStart hook and output style), a Codex plugin, or paste directly into the system prompt / AGENTS.md / .cursorrules.

- The selling point is that it's measurable: the top of the README shows the badges "95% fewer visible reply defects" and "9 models benchmarked". The numbers are recalculated in CI by `evals/check_numbers.py` from committed raw files. The author also published an audit saying the old metric only tested rule-following, not how readers perceive the text (WHY-USELESS-2026-09-02.md).

- Slogan: "your AI writes like a LinkedIn post. make it write like a Boeing manual."

- Author: GitHub AminBlg (Amin Boulegroun, 57 followers, X @sotch_desu). Other repos mostly have 0–4 stars, the newest, kaller, has 49. 72/90 commits are by the author. Last push 2026-10-05, and it has been largely unmaintained since. (GitHub API)

### 2. Growth curve and milestones

| Date | Event | Stars (source) |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-07-18 | @geogristle's X post "You can get LLMs to write good non-AI-slop-sounding technical documentation by requiring them to adhere to ASD-STE100" went viral. On HN someone asked "why did ASD-STE100 suddenly get popular?" and the answer was this tweet (HN item 49117239) | — |
| 07-20 | danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill created | — |
| 07-21 | SimpleEnglish created, 9 commits that day | 0 |
| 07-24 | YouTube "The cure for AI slop is a 1986 aircraft manual" (Vusal Ismayilov), reached HN with 14 points 7-27 | — |
| 07-30 daytime | Our repo snapshot | 30(danyuchn 77) |
| 07-30 19:34 UTC | HN user navs (Australian engineer, karma 1177, unrelated to the author) posted "Agent Skill to Force Docs in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English". 363 points, 44+ top-level comments | — |
| 07-31 | aiweekly.co ran a piece saying it "cuts Claude STE violations 72.9%" | About 1,170 (gittrend curve) |
| 08-01 → 08-07 | First week | About 1,280 → 1,945 (+660 in one week, which matches the "LinkedIn logged +651 in a single week" recall reason) |
| 08-08 | On X, a post saying "always use ASD-STE100" went into Claude memory got 656k views and 5,871 likes (relayed by MindPattern), but the post named danyuchn | About 2,000 |
| 08-09 | Ruben Hassid (who says he writes for 800k people) published a Substack, "How to deslop Claude in 2 words", promoting his own STE skill | — |
| 09-01 | About 3,065; v2.0.0 shipped the same day with major rule changes | gittrend |
| Around 10-02 | Karpathy tweeted the suggestion "Explain [topic] in 80% ASD-STE100". Chinese communities (什么值得买, HTX) and Medium followed across the board | 10-04 about 3,726 → 10-09 3,829 (github repo), only about 100 gained in one week |
| In parallel | danyuchn 9-26 2,240 → 10-09 4,155 → 11-06 6,099, overtook it | GitHub repo |
| 11-03/04 | Russian aggregator devtrends.ru, readmex and others wrote about it. 11-04 gained +77 in one day and reached #17,11-05 and then #13 on GitHub Trending's Python daily chart | github repo trending table |
| 11-06 | 4,246 (repo) / 4,270 (GitHub API, live); +181 in 7 days | — |

Trendshift: +1,055 stars from 9-07 to 11-06, and it never made Trendshift's Top 25 in 61 days. So about 3/4 of the stars came in the 5 weeks from 7-30 to 9-07. HN was the only real ignition.

### 3. Competitors

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from SimpleEnglish |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill | Open source | 2026-07-20 | 6,152 stars; 9.1K installs on skills.sh | A day earlier. Positioned as English rewritten for agents to read (tool descriptions, inter-agent instructions). The 8-08 X post with 650k views and Karpathy's wave mostly pointed to it. No CI benchmark. |
| 0xpili/simplified-technical-english | Open source | 2026-08-16 | 1,025 stars, barely growing now | Late to the same idea |
| dualface/ste-zh(+ste-zht) | Open source | 2026-10-05 | 875 star(10-28 444 → 11-01 815) | A Chinese version, "report in Chinese following STE principles", riding Karpathy's Chinese wave |
| lemonhall/asd-ste100-skill-zh, mzopedia/simplified-technical-chinese | Open source | 2026-10 | 90 / 80 star | Chinese controlled language |
| blagoySimandov/asd-ste100-writer-skill, NikolaRHristov/STE-Code, TheAngryByrd, jsath, nuelcyoung, JAICHANGPARK, menonpg/ste-prompt | Open source | 07-19 to 10-08 | 17–101 star | Same time, same topic. Some posted Show HN, some didn't. None took off. |
| PostHog writing-simplified-technical-english | Big-company feature (a skill inside PostHog's repo) | Not verified | Not verified | Part of an internal company writing standard |
| blader/humanizer, hardikpandya/stop-slop | Open source | 2026-01 | 65.6K / 18.7K star | A broader "anti-AI-flavor" niche: edits against a checklist of AI tics, not tied to any single standard |
| TAJD/economist-style-guide-plugin | Open source | 2025-12 | 128 star | Doing the same thing with The Economist's style guide |
| One prompt ("use ASD-STE100" written into CLAUDE.md / memory), Claude's built-in concise output style, or doc linters like Vale | Big-company features / others | — | Zero cost | The top HN objection is "one prompt is enough". One whoislewys.com test found a one-line skill is 58% cheaper with about the same results |

Bottom line: it's not that there were no competitors. About 10 near-identical repos showed up within a week of the same meme. Only two actually took off: SimpleEnglish (it caught HN) and danyuchn (it caught X and two Karpathy waves).

### 4. Where users came from (growth tactics)

1. **HN front page (confirmed)** : submitted by a third-party long-time user on 7-30, 363 points. Half the comments were complaining "the README itself is AI-written" and "a one-line prompt is enough," but the argument itself kept the post on top. The author never showed up on HN.

2. **Platform event / riding a topic (confirmed)** : an X viral post on 7-18 kicked off "ASD-STE100 to cure AI slop." The chair of the ASD official STE maintenance group posted on LinkedIn about an "Unprecedented Surge" (reshared by ASD STEMG, early August). It was a finished product by day three.

3. **AI newsletters and aggregators (confirmed)** : aiweekly.co (7-31), Enterprise DNA AI Pulse (8-08, 8-10), MindPattern, hysenlabs, ageshio, gitofanton, a Reddit r/BestGitHubRepos post ("4.2k stars"), devtrends.ru (11-04), readmex. Most of them were copying the numbers from the README.

4. **Word-of-mouth recommendations (confirmed)** : from early August to September, at least 4 HN users linked it unprompted in other threads (the GPT-5.6 price cut, Claude Opus 5.5, Grok 4.7, the agent.md post), saying "OpenAI listens to this" and "after a few weeks of using it, docstrings got noticeably better."

5. **Absorbed by a major agent project (confirmed)** : Nous Research's Hermes Agent ported it into an official optional skill, `official/creative/simple-english`, credited to AminBlg.

6. **Skill directories and SEO (confirmed, but not done by the author)** : skills.sh, ui-skills, explainx, aiskill.market, and openagentskill all index it. Chinese sites like "Yao Tu Network" began mass-producing "SimpleEnglish deep dive" SEO articles in late October (qwbw.cn, mwwr.cn), content farms riding the keyword.

7. **Self-promotion by the author** : found no evidence of the author's X account @sotch_desu or LinkedIn promotion (the local x-radar corpus returns nothing; not verified). The stargazer list is no longer returned publicly by GitHub, so star farming can't be ruled out directly. But the curve and the HN timing line up perfectly, and the HN post was not made by the author, so it doesn't look farmed.

### 5. Why it took off

- **Timing** : it shipped a finished product on an X meme that had blown up three days earlier. Before 7-30 it had only about 30 stars, so the meme itself wasn't the driver. It needed a distribution event.

- **What ignited it on HN** : the Show HN posts from the same period, blagoySimandov and STE-Code, got only 3–4 points each. Its title "Agent Skill to Force Docs in..." plus a slogan-style first README line was built for an HN argument. Most of the stars after that came from the long tail of HN's week and newsletter reposts.

- **The "measurable" packaging** : the top of the README has benchmark badges, before-and-after comparisons, and CI recalculation, which makes it look like "engineering" rather than "one prompt." The aiweekly headline used the 72.9% number directly. That's also what HN critics attacked, but it works on bookmarking crowds.

- **Install coverage** : one `npx skills add` plus a Claude Code / Codex plugin and an output style. Users who wanted "set it as the default output style" (the needs raised by HN commenters grim_io and SoMomentary) had a ready path. This is probably why its install count (14.5K) overtook danyuchn's (9.1K) even though danyuchn has more stars.

- **Kept iterating into late September** : five versions, v1.2 → v2.1.1, 9-01 commits on one day with 25 in total; after 10-05 it stopped updating, and growth dropped to about 20 per day.

### 6. Differentiation

Compared with danyuchn: danyuchn writes English for "between agents" (tool descriptions, inter-agent instructions). SimpleEnglish writes for "humans reading replies and docs," with two levels (default plain / strict on demand) and formatting rules (no em dashes, no bold-heavy lists). In effect it reworked STE into "a de-Claude-ified style," with a broader scope than the original STE. The other difference is evals + CI + self-audit, which no other repo in its category has.

Is that why it took off? Half of it. The traffic came from timing and that one HN run (external event + luck). Differentiation determined whether it stuck around long enough to get installed: its install lead, its absorption by Hermes, and people recommending it unprompted in HN threads all point to the package of "benchmarks + plugin + output style." But it missed the Karpathy wave, which shows differentiation can't replace distribution: whoever a big account names gets the stars.

### 7. How many people can see it

- It was covered by HN's front page (363 points), several AI newsletters, Reddit aggregator posts, and Russian/Chinese aggregator sites. The topic itself was discussed in an X post that Karpathy had pushed (650k views), though the post named a competitor. Open source and free, no revenue.

- Copycats appeared early: by July there were about 10 near-identical repos. In October a Chinese version appeared (dualface/ste-zh, 875 stars), along with a Karpathy-80% version (JAICHANGPARK), ste-prompt, and others.

- Conclusion: it falls under "already widely discussed." The category is saturated, and building a copy now has no point.

### 8. What others can learn

- "Packaging an existing industry standard or style guide as an Agent Skill" is a repeatable formula. The standard brings authority and a story ("1983 years of aviation maintenance manuals"), which is easier to sell than a self-invented prompt. The same pattern already exists with an Economist-style skill, ISO 24495 plain language, Karpathy's understanding ladder, and simplified technical Chinese.

- Ship a finished product within 72 hours of an X meme appearing, then get it onto HN (ideally submitted by a third party).

- First screen of the README: a one-line contrast slogan + before/after comparison + badges with numbers. The numbers must be reproducible (via CI) so they can withstand HN scrutiny.

- Cover every install path at once (skills CLI + Claude Code plugin + Codex plugin + paste-in version + a 60-token minimal version). Install counts say more than stars do.

- The counterexample: once the author stopped updating, the next topic peak (Karpathy) was taken by a competitor that kept updating and got named by big accounts.

### 9. Uncertain

- The daily star counts from 7-30 to 8-31 were back-calculated from the gittrend SVG curve, with an error of about ±50. The 7-30 count of 30 stars is our database snapshot from that day (exact time unknown, probably before the HN post).

- Whether the author self-promoted on X / LinkedIn: not found. The stargazer details are no longer returned by GitHub, so star farming can't be checked.

- The cause of the small peak on 11-04 (+77) is unconfirmed, though the timing matches the coverage on devtrends.ru / readmex.

- The skills.sh install counts are anonymous telemetry from the Vercel CLI; the counting method is unverified.

- The exact date and text of Karpathy's original post were not read directly. It is inferred from second-hand coverage of 10-03/10-04 to be around 10-02.

### Sources

- [github.com/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish](https://github.com/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish) (README, commits, releases, GitHub API)

- HN: [news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49114639); [news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49117239](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49117239); comments 49804453, 49791908, 49422199, 49251206

- Original X viral post: [x.com/geogristle/status/2078492579511906771](https://x.com/geogristle/status/2078492579511906771) (ID converted to 2026-07-18)

- [mindpattern.ai/f/19637](https://mindpattern.ai/f/19637) (8-08 X post, 656k views), [mindpattern.ai/f/17792](https://mindpattern.ai/f/17792)

- [aiweekly.co/alerts/simpleenglish-agent-skill-cuts-claude-ste…](https://aiweekly.co/alerts/simpleenglish-agent-skill-cuts-claude-ste-violations-729)

- [ruben.substack.com/p/how-to-deslop-claude-in-2-words](https://ruben.substack.com/p/how-to-deslop-claude-in-2-words)

- [www.linkedin.com/posts/asd-stemg_activity-749032305209498009…](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/asd-stemg_activity-7490323052094980096-WA-2)

- [post.smzdm.com/p/apqm8620/](https://post.smzdm.com/p/apqm8620/)(Karpathy 80% ASD-STE100)

- [trendshift.io/repositories/97933](https://trendshift.io/repositories/97933) ;[gittrend.io/repo/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish](https://gittrend.io/repo/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish)

- [skills.sh/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish](https://skills.sh/AminBlg/SimpleEnglish) ;[skills.sh/danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill](https://skills.sh/danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill)

- [hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/skills/optiona…](https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/docs/user-guide/skills/optional/creative/creative-simple-english)

- [devtrends.ru/python/aminblg-simpleenglish](https://devtrends.ru/python/aminblg-simpleenglish)

- Our github repos: repo_day (AminBlg/SimpleEnglish, danyuchn/asd-ste100-skill, 0xpili, dualface), trending (2026-11-04/05 Python daily chart)

This article was written by AI from public data and the data we collect daily. Numbers are sourced, and inferences are labeled.