The Standard Before the Tool

Three Claude writing skills measured against the written-communication literature — established first, so the critique could not be reverse-engineered from the thing being judged. The STE skill is the most standards-grounded of the three; nothing in the set tells a writer which technique to reach for.

claude-writing-skillsASD-STE100Plain language

The brief asks a deliberately ordered question. First: what do the research and practitioner literatures say written communication should do, and how does that vary by purpose, audience and content type? Only then: how do the three skills in nonatofabio/claude-writing-skillsste, plainspoken, humanize — measure against it.

The ordering is the whole design. The output was meant as a proposal to that repository’s maintainer, and a critique is only worth reading if its standard was set before the thing being judged. A synthesis assembled after looking at the tool would have found exactly the gaps it went looking for.

Two runs answer the identical brief — the same brief_sha256 — and differ in one variable: whether the models could read the live web. Offline produced 26 claims for $0.75; searching produced 37 for $3.03. The pair is itself a finding about what four times the money buys, on a question where nobody has yet checked whether the extra citations are accurate.

Which is the limitation to carry: this is Silver, not Gold. Three models answered, a fourth scored every claim against all three and quoted the span each score rests on — but no source audit was done. Nobody has verified that the cited works say what the models say they say.