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I 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 th

I 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/40d41542d2f335a0ecb431142747a3b62c7111db https://github.com/gavrielc/nanoclaw/commit/40d41542d2f335a0...

iterateoften 8mo ago
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
- hugeackman 8mo ago
  Been writing code professionally for almost 3 decades. Not one line of code I wrote 20 years ago has the same economic value as East German currency. All code is social ephemera. Ethno objects. It lacks intrinsic value of something like indoor plumbing. It's electrical state in a machine. Our only real goal was convince people the symbols on the screen were coupled to some real world value while it is 100% decoupled from whatever real physical quantity we are tracking. We all been Frank from Always Sunny; we make money, line go up. We don't define truth. The churn of physics does that.
  - chasd00 8mo ago
    i think about this xkcd all the time, just colors on a screen in a pattern. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/computer_problems.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/computer_problems.png
101008 8mo ago
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): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850317
- redfloatplane 8mo ago
  I don’t want to come off like I’m shitting on the poster here. I’ve definitely made that kind of careless mistake, probably a dozen times this week. And maybe we’re heading to a future where nobody even reads the readme anymore because they won’t be needed because an agent can just conjure one from the source code at will, so maybe it actually straight up doesn’t matter. I’ve just been thinking about what it means to release software nowadays, and I think the window for releasing software for clout and credit is closing, since creating software basically requires a Claude subscription and an idea now, so fewer people are impressed by the thing simply existing, and the standard of care for a project released for that aim (of clout) needs to be higher than it maybe needed to be in the past. But who knows, I’m probably already a dinosaur in today’s world, and I really don’t mean to shit on the OP - it’s a good idea for a project and it makes a lot of sense for it to exist. I just can’t tell if any actual care has gone into it, and if not, why promote?
  - isodev 8mo ago
    > I don’t want to come off like I’m shitting on the poster Why not, if they're making people read AI slop without checking it first? They deserve the shit-nudge to fix it.
    - roysting 8mo ago
      That seems like a fair perspective; OP “shit” AI Slop on us so the minimum the project deserves is being shit on for making people look at his unreviewed sloppy project without at least warning about it being unreviewed. Just consider what a bigger AI shit show vortex we are looking at, where this project only exists because of other ill considered AI slop projects. But at the same time, AI is not going anywhere and it does have the potential to massively “improve” things. I believe it’s really just that we are going through adaptation pains, with everyone really just being sloppy for all the same kinds of reasons that people were sloppy before AI. It’s not like even the biggest corporations didn’t create sloppy messes before AI. Microsoft is a canonical example of this whole notion for basically its whole existence; poorly conceived, sloppily executed, even its core product line being so inherently insecure that it has not just spun up its own separate sectors of industries, but multiple sectors of industries around patching the security sieve called Microsoft, something akin to a monopoly on plumbing created from wire mesh. It is making me think of how to increase the quality of my QA and final review process though. But frankly, I think we will soon fondly reminisce about a time when AI still produced slop and a human was actually useful and even needed to do QA and final review; as bleak as that sounds. I don’t see how that will not be the case within two years from now, and that’s probably being generous, as fast as things have been developing.
jimminyx 8mo ago
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 ;)
- redfloatplane 8mo ago
  Hey, you do you, I’m glad you appreciate my perspective. I wasn’t trying to catch you out but I see how it came across that way - I apologise for my edit, I had hoped the ;) would show that I meant it in jest rather than in meanness but I shouldn’t have added it in the first place. As I said in my comment, no shade for writing the code with Claude. I do it too, every day. I wasn’t “irked” by the readme, and I did read it. But it didn’t give me a sense that you had put in “time and effort” because it felt deeply LLM-authored, and my comment was trying to explore that and how it made me feel. I had little meaningful data on whether you put in that effort because the readme - the only thing I could really judge the project by - sounded vibe coded too. And if I can’t tell if there has been care put into something like the readme how can I tell if there’s been care put into any part of the project? If there has and if that matters - say, I put care into this and that’s why I’m doing a show HN about it - then it should be evident and not hidden behind a wall of LLM-speak! Or at least; that’s what I think. As I said in a sibling comment, maybe I’m already a dinosaur and this entire topic won’t matter in a few years anyway.
jofzar 8mo ago
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.
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- charcircuit 8mo ago
  Why do you think people do not care about something if they AI generated it? I care about many things I've generated.
  - wernsey 8mo ago
    It's the perception. "I couldn't be bothered to write a proper README, so I had the AI do it"
    - charcircuit 8mo ago
      AI can write a proper README. In fact, it's better than me at doing so and keeping it up to date. People writing README with AI are bothering to write it. In my experience AI won't automatically create README files for you when making projects with the exception of create project tools which create a default README, but in that case usually the AI ignores it and leaves it in the default state. People are just using a tool that lets them create without manually typing in each individual character.
    - vidarh 8mo ago
      Most manually written README's I come across are in a far worse state than an AI generated one. To the point that I will often ask an AI to summarise third-party projects for me because the README's are so abysmal.
- djeastm 8mo ago
raincole 8mo ago
> 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 Don't worry, bro. If enough people are like you, there will be fully automatic workflow to add typos into AI writing.
- Nevermark 8mo ago
  As a practical matter, if it tones down the AI sleuthing vs. reading, it might be a good idea. Assuming the written/generated text is well written/generated, of course.
muyuu 8mo ago
the main reason I'd want a person to write or at least curate readmes is because models have, at least for the time being, this tendency to make confident and plausible-sounding claims that are completely false (hallucination applied to claims on the stuff they just made) so long as this is commonplace I'd be extremely sceptical of anything with some LLM-style readmes and docs the caveats to this is that LLMs can be trained to fool people with human-sounding and imperfectly written readmes, and that although humans can quickly oversee that things compile and seem to produce the expected outputs, there's deeper stuff like security issues and subtle userspace-breaking changes track-record is going to see its importance redoubled
swyx 8mo ago
orrrr you could go the other way and read explicitly ai-generated docs that use the code as source of truth https://deepwiki.com/gavrielc/nanoclaw https://deepwiki.com/gavrielc/nanoclaw
- jstanley 8mo ago
  Cool idea but I just tried it out on one of my own repos and I couldn't get past the reCAPTCHA, maybe remove that. (I'm a human btw)
raahelb 8mo ago
You will definitely like Josh Mock's recent post: https://joshmock.com/post/2026-agents-md-as-a-dark-signal/ https://joshmock.com/post/2026-agents-md-as-a-dark-signal/
- roysting 8mo ago
  I am confused by “senior-learning engineer”; so he’s learning as a senior, learning at a “senior” level in a “continuous learning”, “life long learning” kind of way? What is senior-learning? Searching for it only comes up with learning for seniors programs.
  - djeastm 8mo ago
    I'm looking at it now and it says "senior-leaning" not "senior-learning" Might've been a typo they've since fixed. >I am, as many senior-leaning engineers are, ambivalent about whether AI is making us more productive coders
pseudony 8mo ago
FWIW, this is a variation of the age-old thing about open source. It isn’t “have it your way”, he graciously made code available, use it or leave it.

iterateoften 8mo ago

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

hugeackman 8mo ago
Been writing code professionally for almost 3 decades. Not one line of code I wrote 20 years ago has the same economic value as East German currency. All code is social ephemera. Ethno objects. It lacks intrinsic value of something like indoor plumbing. It's electrical state in a machine. Our only real goal was convince people the symbols on the screen were coupled to some real world value while it is 100% decoupled from whatever real physical quantity we are tracking. We all been Frank from Always Sunny; we make money, line go up. We don't define truth. The churn of physics does that.
- chasd00 8mo ago
  i think about this xkcd all the time, just colors on a screen in a pattern. https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/computer_problems.png https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/computer_problems.png

101008 8mo ago

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): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850317 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46850317

redfloatplane 8mo ago
I don’t want to come off like I’m shitting on the poster here. I’ve definitely made that kind of careless mistake, probably a dozen times this week. And maybe we’re heading to a future where nobody even reads the readme anymore because they won’t be needed because an agent can just conjure one from the source code at will, so maybe it actually straight up doesn’t matter. I’ve just been thinking about what it means to release software nowadays, and I think the window for releasing software for clout and credit is closing, since creating software basically requires a Claude subscription and an idea now, so fewer people are impressed by the thing simply existing, and the standard of care for a project released for that aim (of clout) needs to be higher than it maybe needed to be in the past. But who knows, I’m probably already a dinosaur in today’s world, and I really don’t mean to shit on the OP - it’s a good idea for a project and it makes a lot of sense for it to exist. I just can’t tell if any actual care has gone into it, and if not, why promote?
- isodev 8mo ago
  > I don’t want to come off like I’m shitting on the poster Why not, if they're making people read AI slop without checking it first? They deserve the shit-nudge to fix it.
  - roysting 8mo ago
    That seems like a fair perspective; OP “shit” AI Slop on us so the minimum the project deserves is being shit on for making people look at his unreviewed sloppy project without at least warning about it being unreviewed. Just consider what a bigger AI shit show vortex we are looking at, where this project only exists because of other ill considered AI slop projects. But at the same time, AI is not going anywhere and it does have the potential to massively “improve” things. I believe it’s really just that we are going through adaptation pains, with everyone really just being sloppy for all the same kinds of reasons that people were sloppy before AI. It’s not like even the biggest corporations didn’t create sloppy messes before AI. Microsoft is a canonical example of this whole notion for basically its whole existence; poorly conceived, sloppily executed, even its core product line being so inherently insecure that it has not just spun up its own separate sectors of industries, but multiple sectors of industries around patching the security sieve called Microsoft, something akin to a monopoly on plumbing created from wire mesh. It is making me think of how to increase the quality of my QA and final review process though. But frankly, I think we will soon fondly reminisce about a time when AI still produced slop and a human was actually useful and even needed to do QA and final review; as bleak as that sounds. I don’t see how that will not be the case within two years from now, and that’s probably being generous, as fast as things have been developing.

jimminyx 8mo ago

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 ;)

redfloatplane 8mo ago
Hey, you do you, I’m glad you appreciate my perspective. I wasn’t trying to catch you out but I see how it came across that way - I apologise for my edit, I had hoped the ;) would show that I meant it in jest rather than in meanness but I shouldn’t have added it in the first place. As I said in my comment, no shade for writing the code with Claude. I do it too, every day. I wasn’t “irked” by the readme, and I did read it. But it didn’t give me a sense that you had put in “time and effort” because it felt deeply LLM-authored, and my comment was trying to explore that and how it made me feel. I had little meaningful data on whether you put in that effort because the readme - the only thing I could really judge the project by - sounded vibe coded too. And if I can’t tell if there has been care put into something like the readme how can I tell if there’s been care put into any part of the project? If there has and if that matters - say, I put care into this and that’s why I’m doing a show HN about it - then it should be evident and not hidden behind a wall of LLM-speak! Or at least; that’s what I think. As I said in a sibling comment, maybe I’m already a dinosaur and this entire topic won’t matter in a few years anyway.

jofzar 8mo ago

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.

deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
charcircuit 8mo ago
Why do you think people do not care about something if they AI generated it? I care about many things I've generated.
- wernsey 8mo ago
  It's the perception. "I couldn't be bothered to write a proper README, so I had the AI do it"
  - charcircuit 8mo ago
    AI can write a proper README. In fact, it's better than me at doing so and keeping it up to date. People writing README with AI are bothering to write it. In my experience AI won't automatically create README files for you when making projects with the exception of create project tools which create a default README, but in that case usually the AI ignores it and leaves it in the default state. People are just using a tool that lets them create without manually typing in each individual character.
  - vidarh 8mo ago
    Most manually written README's I come across are in a far worse state than an AI generated one. To the point that I will often ask an AI to summarise third-party projects for me because the README's are so abysmal.
djeastm 8mo ago

raincole 8mo ago

> 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 Don't worry, bro. If enough people are like you, there will be fully automatic workflow to add typos into AI writing.

Nevermark 8mo ago
As a practical matter, if it tones down the AI sleuthing vs. reading, it might be a good idea. Assuming the written/generated text is well written/generated, of course.

muyuu 8mo ago

the main reason I'd want a person to write or at least curate readmes is because models have, at least for the time being, this tendency to make confident and plausible-sounding claims that are completely false (hallucination applied to claims on the stuff they just made) so long as this is commonplace I'd be extremely sceptical of anything with some LLM-style readmes and docs the caveats to this is that LLMs can be trained to fool people with human-sounding and imperfectly written readmes, and that although humans can quickly oversee that things compile and seem to produce the expected outputs, there's deeper stuff like security issues and subtle userspace-breaking changes track-record is going to see its importance redoubled

swyx 8mo ago

orrrr you could go the other way and read explicitly ai-generated docs that use the code as source of truth https://deepwiki.com/gavrielc/nanoclaw https://deepwiki.com/gavrielc/nanoclaw

jstanley 8mo ago
Cool idea but I just tried it out on one of my own repos and I couldn't get past the reCAPTCHA, maybe remove that. (I'm a human btw)

raahelb 8mo ago

You will definitely like Josh Mock's recent post: https://joshmock.com/post/2026-agents-md-as-a-dark-signal/ https://joshmock.com/post/2026-agents-md-as-a-dark-signal/

roysting 8mo ago
I am confused by “senior-learning engineer”; so he’s learning as a senior, learning at a “senior” level in a “continuous learning”, “life long learning” kind of way? What is senior-learning? Searching for it only comes up with learning for seniors programs.
- djeastm 8mo ago
  I'm looking at it now and it says "senior-leaning" not "senior-learning" Might've been a typo they've since fixed. >I am, as many senior-leaning engineers are, ambivalent about whether AI is making us more productive coders

pseudony 8mo ago

FWIW, this is a variation of the age-old thing about open source. It isn’t “have it your way”, he graciously made code available, use it or leave it.