doc-standards

A Claude Code skill that makes documentation pass professional writing standards — and proves it with a lint gate.

Documentation written by an LLM has a smell: synonym rotation, subordinate clauses, filler, hedging. This skill removes it with the constraints professional documentation systems already use. The idea started from a post by @dcoderio about ASD-STE100, then grew into a five-layer criteria stack.

The five layers

Install

Copy the doc-standards folder into your skills directory:

cp -r doc-standards ~/.claude/skills/doc-standards

Claude Code picks it up automatically. The skill triggers on requests such as "write docs", "document this", "improve the README", or "the docs smell AI-written".

What is inside

doc-standards/
├── SKILL.md                      # workflow: structure → draft → style → AI pass → gate
├── references/
│   ├── ste100.md                 # ASD-STE100 digest: word, sentence, and safety-text rules
│   ├── style-guides.md           # Google + Microsoft house-style digest
│   ├── ai-readability.md         # self-contained sections, llms.txt format
│   └── vale-setup.md             # Vale install, per-project config, CI
├── scripts/
│   └── check_docs.py             # zero-dependency lint gate
└── evals/
    └── evals.json                # test prompts for the skill-creator eval loop

The lint gate

check_docs.py needs only Python 3. It checks sentence length, passive voice, banned words, terminology drift, heading hierarchy, and relative-link integrity:

python3 doc-standards/scripts/check_docs.py docs/

When you install Vale and add a .vale.ini to the project, the script defers its style checks to Vale and keeps only the structural checks. The exit code is 1 when any error-level finding exists, so the gate drops into CI as-is.

Terminology drift is the check that catches the strongest LLM tell. When a document uses "verify", "check", and "confirm" interchangeably, the gate reports it and the skill prescribes the fix: a terminology table with one approved term per concept.

Does it work?

An A/B test with two identical agents wrote a README for the same small CLI tool. The agent with the skill passed 6 of 6 assertions and produced 1 lint finding. The agent without it passed 3 of 6 and produced 6 findings — it placed the destructive-action warning after the command it protects, used a positional "as shown above" reference, and rotated between "argument", "flag", and "option". The eval prompts ship in evals/evals.json so you can rerun the comparison.

This README passes its own gate:

python3 doc-standards/scripts/check_docs.py README.md

License

MIT