alt Hacker NewsI think these days if I’m going to be actively promoting code I’ve created (with Claude, no shade for that), I’ll make sure to write the documentation, or at the very least the readme, by hand. The smell of LLM from the docs of any project puts me off even when I like the idea of the project itself, as in this case. It’s hard to describe why - maybe it feels like if you care enough to promote it, you should care to try and actually communicate, person to person, to the human being promoted at. Dunno, just my 2c and maybe just my own preference. I’d rather read a typo-ridden five line readme explaining the problem the code is there to solve for you and me,the humans, not dozens of lines of perfectly penned marketing with just the right number of emoji. We all know how easy it is to write code these days. Maybe use some of that extra time to communicate with the humans. I dunno.
Edit: I see you, making edits to the readme to make it sound more human-written since I commented ;) https://github.com/gavrielc/nanoclaw/commit/40d41542d2f335a0...
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I 100% agree, reading very obviously ai written blogs and "product pages"/readme's has turned into a real ick for me.
Just something that screams "I don't care about my product/readme page, why should you".
To be clear, no issue with using AI to write the actual program/whatever it is. It's just the readme/product page which super turns me off even trying/looking into it.
Project releases with llms have grown to be less about the functionality and more about convincing others to care.
Before the proof of work of code in a repo by default was a signal of a lot of thought going into something. Now this flood of code in these vibe coded projects is by default cheap and borderline meaningless. Not throwing shade or anything at coding assistants. Just the way it goes
I agree 100% with you. It's even worse though. They haven't checked if the Readme has hallucinated it or not (spoiler: it has):
OP here. Appreciate your perspective but I don't really accept the framing, which feels like it's implying that I've been caught out for writing and coding with AI.
I don't make any attempt to hide it. Nearly every commit message says "Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5". You correctly pointed out that there were some AI smells in the writing, so I removed them, just like I correct typos, and the writing is now better.
I don't care deeply about this code. It's not a masterpiece. It's functional code that is very useful to me. I'm sharing it because I think it can be useful to other people. Not as production code but as a reference or starting point they can use to build (collaboratively with claude code) functional custom software for themselves.
I spent a weekend giving instructions to coding agents to build this. I put time and effort into the architecture, especially in relation to security. I chose to post while it's still rough because I need to close out my work on it for now - can't keep going down this rabbit hole the whole week :) I hope it will be useful to others.
BTW, I know the readme irked you but if you read it I promise it will make a lot more sense where this project is coming from ;)