An argument against telling your agent to "talk like a human"

Mehta argues against a pattern he's seeing spread through skills and agents.md files: instructions like "talk to me like I have ADHD" or "respond only in Simplified Technical English." His point is that the simplification happens inline, during the same pass as the actual work, competing for the same context budget as the task itself: "That compression is lossy. You probably never notice what got dropped because the output still reads nicely." He argues it compounds across agent-to-agent chains, where a subagent's messy findings (stack traces, conflicting evidence, unresolved branches) get smoothed into prose before a parent agent, or the user, ever sees them. His proposed fix is to keep agent-to-agent and agent-to-log communication in dense, structured, machine-facing form, and compress only once, at the point a human actually reads it, comparing it to how databases, compilers, and APIs already separate their internal representation from their display layer. At 09:00 EDT, the Hacker News discussion stood at 211 points and 138 comments roughly 20 hours after posting.

Why it matters: Check your agents.md or skills folder for a "keep it simple" or "talk to me like X" instruction. Mehta argues that it competes with task instructions for the same space and may cause error signals to disappear from agent output.