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Comment by vanillameow | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question - your README is full of em-dashes, emojis, feature squares and ASCII diagrams - none of which are present in your pre-AI era projects.

Why do you expect a potential userbase to care to read something you didn't even care to write?

Seems a bit disrespectful to me.

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Provided he reviewed it and checked the readme is telling the users what it needs to tell them - what's the issue? I've found documentation to be one of the better tasks AI can perform and see no reason why not to use it provided a human is in the loop.

Just looking at the diagrams in the README, the broken ASCII suggests to me it either wasn't looked at or the author didn't care.

I agree, but its tricky as many people seem to not read it and I have seen AI documentation that is so verbose and dense that its almost as useless as not having it. Its a fine line but so long as the AI documentation is reviewed and reasonable then I see no issue.

It's a strong signal of low quality.

The question is: "Should I spend my time engaging with this project?"

The AI-forward presentation says: "Absolutely not."

1. In reality most people simply do not do this, and frankly it's exhausting to be expected to always assume goodwill in a setting that is full of pure vanity.

2. There's a difference between technical documentation, which AI can be quite decent at, and product marketing. A README is usually about 20/80, maybe 50/50 for large FOSS projects. You can have the AI write the sections on how to install the thing for all I care, but as soon as AI is telling me why I should use it, you've lost me. Signals a complete lack of interest in your own product.

Potential userbase... you mean people who use OpenClaw? Not sure if they care.

Probably not the typical OpenClaw user. I’ve had that thought myself.

But I can imagine that medium-sized companies will want to use AI as a backend in the future, without wanting to be dependent on Antropic.

After all, there are already quite a few companies using OpenClaw.

A self-hosted OpenClaw instance (or other solutions in the future) with Relay would be a good alternative to Claude Cowork.

I do think a properly hand-written readme it better, but if not, here's a blatant plug - https://github.com/joelio/plain-english

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