alt Hacker NewsWhy does AI-generated imply "not bothered" to you? If I take all of my design docs/specs, all of the existing repo, and I tell an agent that I'd like to make a readme that contains things X, Y, and Z, what's the problem?
Rejecting slop doesn't imply rejecting all AI-generated text wholesale.
Replies
> what's the problem?
I can do it. Anyone can do it. Probably better for my/their own needs than someone else’s agent can.
The README is meant to communicate substance and intent. Without the latter it’s an overly-verbose landing page.
If it wasn’t important enough for someone to take the time to write, it isn’t important enough for me to take the time to read.
We all know AI does not write well today.
What JetBrains needs is nothing short of a revolutionary product, which they would need to sell with an excellent introduction.
Instead they phoned it in and pasted that slop:
> Once a GitHub PR is open it shows the CI checks and review decision, and lets you mark it ready, hand failing checks or a diverged branch to the agent, merge it with the repository's last-used method, reopen it, or delete the remote branch.
Why does AI-generated imply "not bothered" to you? If I am not bothered to write the content, so I ask the agent to do it for me, what’s the problem?
The problem is that it’s market or care and respect. If you can’t even be bothered to while a simple readme communication your intentions, what else can’t you be bothered doing properly?
It’s a marker that the project is likely to be low-effort slop, which may or may not just be abandoned at the deep of a hat.
Because AI-generated README means that the person doesn't care about the audience. It means that the author never read the README themselves to see that the "load-bearing ground truths" actually reflect what the project is about, and not some hallucinated bullshit.
There's a famous Jobs story in which he insisted that even the insides of the computers be made beautiful. Because that shows care. Now people are arguing that even the outsides can be as ugly as they want, who cares.
> Why does AI-generated imply "not bothered" to you?
If it is blatant unfixed llmese, then it means that no effort whatsoever was put into making this text.
> Why does AI-generated imply "not bothered" to you?
1. AI generated text is just hard to read and verbose, if you worked so hard on your docs/specs, why would you want your README to be unreadable?
2. There's so much garbage written with AI that I'm just going to assume yours also is. Would you sign up to a gym with broken windows? It could be the best gym ever, but I wouldn't count on it.