I refuse to take a repo with an AI-generated readme seriously. If you haven't bothered to write a readme, what else have you not bothered to do?
(100% AI according to Pangram btw)
(100% AI according to Pangram btw)
Thanks JetBrains, I assumed the app would assemble prompts behind my back, so I'm glad they clarified that.
If they bothered reading this that would have been removed. I understand smaller players... Vibe Coders, Solo projects, something on its initial commit (to be edited / cleaned up / improved).
But, from JetBrains? Bad sign for the industry, IMO. Is it that fucking hard to have a decent technical writer collect some some human-readable documentation? This just exudes lack of effort.
If you care about these things you are either not the intended target or you are a hypocrite.
Yep. The "A $thing, $elaboration." has joined "$title. $thing, $past_verb." in my "this team didn't care enough to do a basic pass over the main page introducing their product" tells.
Conciseness and highlighting relevant points is much more important than word count. Machine generated readmes are anything but. Sorry you can’t tell the difference between that and human prose, you should try reading more human content.
This is a useful criticism.
Left to themselves, LLMs prefer writing that's really atrocious. e.g. The writing will try and make everything sound profound.
The other problem I've noticed is e.g. LLMs will write in stuff that's inappropriate for the content of the text. e.g. Writing out stuff that looks like a chat reply, in commentary or descriptions or whatever.
I'd distinguish, though, between "sloppy writing" & "LLM generated writing". I'd agree if you didn't put in the effort to check the writing is of high quality, then perhaps the other parts are also not high quality.
I don't think just because "AI" wrote it it's bad. I wouldn't prefer e.g. sloppy human writing over well-crafted LLM-written text.
This readme the main thing which sticks out is the "what you get" bullet points are rather dense/verbose for bullet points. But aside from that it seems fine.
During the preset testing, I created dozens of READMEs using agents. Although I can't say that any of them were perfect for me, most of them were good enough.
README is a very special kind of document. For small projects, it's often the only one that potential users will read. The README should explain what the product is, what problems it solves, how to get started, provide some examples, and explain the restrictions. It should cover all these topics in a concise way so that even readers who aren't used to read long texts can easily read through it. It's definitely up to human to make it clear and easy to understand.
Rejecting slop doesn't imply rejecting all AI-generated text wholesale.
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.
Skill issue, it’s easy for a guy like me
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.
The answer is very short.
But given you dont know me, im going to guess you wont be foolish enough to try and guess especially considering there are at least 100 different flavours.
Software is even more complicated. How is any person even the smartest software type in the world or AI going to know all the exact details of your wish if nobody tells them exactly every painful detail ?
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.
Then I’ll probably hear about it again from someone I trust. I don’t need to be the first in my circle to test if this one is different.
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.
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.
If it is blatant unfixed llmese, then it means that no effort whatsoever was put into making this text.
Well, good luck in professional development then. Love it or hate it, this is the way everything is moving.
I care whether the readme is any good, not who wrote it. If you haven't bothered to critique the readme and instead critique its suspected creator — something entirely in your head — what else have you not bothered to do?
> (100% AI according to Pangram btw)
So what? Who cares about Pangram? I certainly don't! You cannot detect AI — it's impossible. Perhaps it's just Kenyans?[0]
[0]: https://marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-dont-write-li...