ASD-STE100

Frontier LLMs like to yap. A lot.

See:

Certainly. To improve workload resilience and reduce the risk of multiple replicas becoming unavailable when a single node fails, we should introduce a scheduling constraint. There are several ways to approach this in Kubernetes, including topology spread constraints and pod anti-affinity. Given the existing Deployment and the goal of separating replicas by hostname, a required pod anti-affinity rule is the most direct solution. This tells the scheduler not to place a pod on a node that already runs another pod with the same label. We should also ensure that the label selector matches the pod template labels, because a mismatch would make the rule ineffective. With those considerations in mind, I recommend updating the pod specification with a requiredDuringSchedulingIgnoredDuringExecution rule using kubernetes.io/hostname as the topology key.

All of that means: add required pod anti-affinity.

Fed up with this? Put this in AGENTS.md:

Use ASD-STE100.

What the hell is that? Something similar to STD? No.

ASD-STE100 is a standard for writing English in technical documentation. ASD is the organization that owns it. STE stands for Simplified Technical English.

The standard is more than 400 pages long. It is boring, but it contains good, practical rules. Not just for clankers, but also for human.

Use active voice

Clearly tell who or what performs an action.

Bad:

The connection was closed by the API server.

Good:

The API server closed the connection.

Use imperative verbs for procedures

Start with the action.

Bad:

You should restart the kubelet after changing its configuration.

Good:

Restart the kubelet after you change its configuration.

Keep sentences short

Separate items. Don’t overestimate other’s context window.

Bad:

If the readiness probe continues to fail after the new version is deployed, which can occur when the database migration has not completed, inspect the migration job before you restart the pods.

Good:

Wait for the database migration to complete. Inspect the migration job if the readiness probe still fails. Then restart the pods.

Avoid synonyms

Be consistent. Repetition is useful.

Bad:

Stop the API service. Update the application. Start the component.

Good:

Stop the API service. Update the API service. Start the API service.

Avoid ambiguous or vague words

Be precise.

Bad:

Restart the pod if memory use gets too high.

Good:

Restart the pod if memory use stays above 500 MiB for five minutes.

No more slop.