Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

Comment by FooBarWidget | Hacker News Reader

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> By writing your documentation with Claude, my brain immediately associates the quality of the project with the quality of unreviewed Claude output.

I'm sorry, but I agree with the author: if a certain writing style makes you associate the work with low-quality, then that's your problem. The author shouldn't have to rewrite the readme just to avoid triggering your automatic unfounded associations. If you look at the substance of the work, including the test cases, then this is clearly not easy work that can be vibe coded in a single pass.

It's just like emdash. Everybody digs on how it's a signifier of LLM text, but I've used emdash for years because it's gramatically correct. I shouldn't have to stop using emdash just to avoid kneejerk reactions.

LLMs often use emdashes in a distinct incorrect way. It's not just the existence of any emdash, although considering you were in a very small minority of older users, it now warrants increased scrutiny, unfortunately for you.

if 99 poor effort/quality projects have a readme that reads in a particular style, then you expect the 100th project with a readme in the same style to also be of poor effort/quality

statistically, it only makes sense for your expectations to immediately be low when you encounter this writing style because there are just so much slop out there

the author is free to keep that writing style but they should be aware that this will—at least on the surface level—make their project look exactly like the metric ton of slop we see posted everyday everywhere

That's like saying a large percentage of X-colored people are criminals, therefore when we see an X-colored person it's reasonable to expect him to be criminal. As a society we have decided that heuristics like this, and prejudicing individuals based on statistics of the group, are not acceptable.

Also, what do we call it when people don't look beyond the writing style, such as at the code, or at the rigorousness of the tests, or at other substances beyond writing style? Slop assessment?

On the other hand I know how to tell if the underlying idea is good, and if it is I can decide to put up with reading through LLM outputs.

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