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Comment by theturtletalks | Hacker News Reader

Just because the ReadMe is slop, doesn’t mean the code is slop. People are starting to make apps for themselves now and open-sourcing them so they’re not putting much thought into the ReadMe or distribution.

This just means ReadMe’s are less important now. I just have my terminal agent dig into the code and tell me what features are there. If the app is actually useful.

Even before AI, there were so many projects with subpar ReadMes, no screenshots, etc. But once you use the software, you realize how good it is.

Source: I maintain a massive collection of open-source alternatives and quality of open-source alternatives have increased a lot

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If you do not respect your project to write your readme yourself chances are i will not care though.

For many new coders, LLMs are so good at writing the code, asking it to write the ReadMe sounds like a good idea. Clearly it’s the first impression your project makes so handwriting it is important.

Being turned off by the project because of the ReadMe is your prerogative. I’m just suggesting you dig into the code sometimes, the ReadMe is not the be all, end all.

But it takes so little effort to wade through an LLM readme and cut out or edit it down to something palatable.

Just the bare minimum effort to do that would be nice.

> For many new coders, LLMs are so good at writing the code, asking it to write the ReadMe sounds like a good idea. Clearly it’s the first impression your project makes so handwriting it is important.

The point is that if they looked at the result they'd question themselves. And the fact that they don't is a violation of the social contract: I can hardly be expected to care about your work, if you don't.

I apply the same rule to the code, unless it is on the job and I have to follow along with the herd, or else....

Perhaps we should have README.md and README.ai the latter containing a bunch of stuff that humans don't want to read but agents can use to answer questions humans ask

Your comment might be sarcastic, but AGENTS.md already exists for the explicit purpose of agents reading and using it.

yeah, my point is just that we agents can have their own docs and we can also have a nice curated experience for humans.

You’re right that a poor quality readme doesn’t mean a poor-quality product, but it seems more likely than not to me.

Slop is an instant tab close for me. If something’s good, it’ll come around again. I’ll catch it when there's some evidence that it’s worth my time.

This project is 100% slop, as evidenced by all commits having a Claude attribution. https://github.com/awlevin/typesafe-computer-use/graphs/cont...

You can produce good code and good projects with Claude doing all the work. This might even be an example of one, but the description on GitHub makes so little sense that I stopped reading before I figured out what it even does.

If the author is too lazy to even write their own commits, I doubt there would be any effort put into the codebase.

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