My most used prompt in the last week is probably "Explain this concisely and simply, like I am a child".
I spent years dumbing things down and creating visuals to support it for decision makers. I am frequently asking ChatGPT to do the same for me.
> ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English (STE) is a controlled natural language that is designed to simplify and clarify technical documentation. It was originally developed in the 1980s by the European Association of Aerospace Industries (AECMA) at the request of the European airline industry, which wanted a standardized form of English for aircraft maintenance documentation that could be easily understood by non-native English-speakers.
I've taken a liking to pointing agents at the Simple English Wikipedia editorial guidelines...but so much of that is for making up for shortcomings of modern Anthropic models. Codex running 6.1-sol explains things so much more clearly that I don't feel I need to assert a style guide on its output.
GPT stays too much in text imho.
- Gemini 3.8 has a beautiful answer. Typography, use of lists, brevity, style, even the font choice on the web harness -- all of it is A tier or even S tier. Notice I didn't say answer quality. The answer is always extremely mid, and the harder the question (or more effort needed to answer it), Google just quits. I give it a "C" on answer quality
- ChatGPT (Chat, pre 6, I assume 5.6 although they commonly hide the model picker): Ugly answer. Runs on printing page after page of unnecessary side notes. Mostly just walls of texts in paragraphs with little thought to information design. However, inside of that mess of text is almost always the answer I'm looking for, and it's almost always incredibly better than the truncated, desgined Gemini answer.
For a while I ran all of my question queries on Gemini and ChatGPT, but I noticed that I basically always picked ChatGPT's answer head to head.
I even found it was capable of stepping back from code implementation and bug hunting to “hang on, it’s not the algorithm that is incorrectly implemented, it is the wrong algorithm for the goal.” GPT Sol (5.6,6 and 6.1) just kept hammering in the problem.
While I do rarely use the web harnesses for technical research, nearly all of my technical questions are going through coding harnesses and layers of my local context, skills, etc, so what I produce from codex/claude code is not comparable to what others produce.
So my comparison of the web harnesses is me asking questions about caring for my baby, or product comparisons of new televisions, or visualizing a room organized differently (google sucked at this so bad, chatgpt did great), or asking for help in a video game, or other normie AI uses lol
I will say, Gemini is the best for asking about google services, such as Flights or Youtube.
That's a very high bar.
My go to phrase that I’ve found to work well is “please restate in high school English with direct declarative sentences and no parentheticals or references that require recalling previous turns of this conversation”
Which I have as a hotkey.
Explain it to me like I'm a golden retriever.
All those complaints about Claude language use make me think we're finally seeing the consequences of a generation growing up on instant messaging.
If I say Claude talks like a meringue it's patently obvious what I'm trying to convey, sweet but full of empty space. If you hear that same metaphor day-in day-out then after a while it doesn't call up a thought at all, it's just an annoying verbal habit.
mine is “explain this 2 me in simple terms”