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Every third post in HN has this same complaint comment. Everybody knows.
by antoniojtorres 7d ago
Every third post in HN has this same complaint comment. Everybody knows.
- soulofmischief 7d agoAnd every comment on HN calling out vibe-coded slop has this same complaint comment in turn. OP has an actual complaint, your complaint is just "stop complaining".
- antoniojtorres 7d agoIt’s not stop complaining as much as it is please contribute something of substance instead of venting hot air into a comment thread where everyone is already aware.
- freehorse 7d ago1/3 of articles warrantying such a comment means it is still important information. If it was 100% of the articles I would agree that it gives no information, but with 1/3 one cannot claim it does not contribute information.
- antoniojtorres 7d agoFair enough.
- ramon156 7d agoI'd rather read it's slop, it actually adds something to the conversation. I'd say "imagine if half the posts on HN aren't worth your time" but this is genuinely how it feels nowadays. I'm not sorry
- soulofmischief 7d agoThe problem is that not everyone thinks like you. You're dictating what is and isn't a signal to others. OP left a comment to signal to people like me. It saved me a click.
- jdlshore 7d agoI appreciate it when people say something is slop. Saves me from wasting my time looking at it. How many slop ideas have come to the front page, never to be heard from again because the execution isn’t actually any good? I’m guessing most of them.
- theturtletalks 7d agoJust 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
- tacomagick 7d agoIf you do not respect your project to write your readme yourself chances are i will not care though.
- theturtletalks 7d agoFor 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.
- sampullman 7d agoBut 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.
- petterroea 7d agoIt's better that everyone is loud about it then everyone giving up and being silently irritated. At least if people complain it's possible to read the room
- caymanjim 7d agoJust flag the post so it drops off the home page and loses audience.
- cyanydeez 7d agoEspecially when the article _is plainly about the use of LLMs to do LLM things_. If this was talking about buying the best apples are the supermarket, sure, complain away about the use of an LLM to talk about apples. But it's really a specious argument about something that likely only exists because an LLM is good at creating that type of project.
- alsetmusic 7d agoThat risks not communicating the reason for the downvotes / flags to the submitter. I think the value of complaining loudly is signalling to those who think LLM write-ups are acceptable (some folks are acting in good faith without understanding why the content is unwanted).
- IshKebab 7d agoClearly the people writing these annoying articles don't know. I wish they'd just use Astra instead. It doesn't write this awful prose.
- slacktivism123 7d ago>Everybody knows. Awesome! I think these repo owners should be required to film themselves reading out their Claudemade readmes with a straight face. Every honest caveat. Every seam. Every "Frames lie, so the walk prunes hard".
- Rexxar 7d agoI prefer when I see other comments to confirm or infirm my opinion.
- flohofwoe 7d agoTbh, I still wonder why people even bother releasing such tools that were shitted out by an LLM in an hour or two, these are basically the modern equivalent of a hastily cobbled together 10-liner shell script (still useful, but not something you'd ever put up as its own Github project). Everybody else can write such tools now by themselves in at most an hour, and they get a tool that's more personalized to their tastes. And why have a readme at all when it's just LLM mumbo-jumbo - that sort of mumbo-jumbo is written for LLMs to consume, not humans.
- zahlman 7d agoIn theory, there is some value in deciding what the LLM ought to shit out, and checking that it works, and maybe even making a design decision or two to try and create something that would be relevant or useful for many people. And then others can possibly save an hour or two, and the data centre can save some water and electricity. In practice, well.
- flohofwoe 7d agoThat sort of careful work would take more than 7 commits and 1 hour though ;)
- zahlman 7d agoThat's 6 more commits than I'm used to seeing for these sorts of efforts, honestly. (But I will cede that people might be doing all the changes locally and then pushing a single commit, without any real understanding of how version control works.)
- jasonjayr 7d agoIf folks do this; I'd love for them to also be in the habit of shipping their prompts + harness configuration too. If we are moving to another code abstraction, then that becomes the source code to modify, adapt and extend. I mean -- compilers used to annoy developers who knew how to hand-roll machine code, with bad outputs and inefficient algorithms, till the compilers got better than most of them...