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Comment by asteroidburger | Hacker News Reader

Why 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.

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> 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.

there is a lot more garbage written by humans, you assume the same for humans?

> hard

Skill issue, it’s easy for a guy like me

> 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.

I can see. Anyone can see.

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.

This is true. I think generated code really shines as internal tooling and not something shared.

Whats my favourite ice cream ?

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 ?

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 fact that you didn't feel it was worth your time to make sure it was excellent is a strong signal that I shouldn't bother to read it.

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.

What if they read it and concluded it was correct?

> What if they read it and concluded it was correct?

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.

If they read it and were fine with blatant llmese, then I do not trust their review abilities at all.

It may be correct, but was it good? If it's obvious that someone has plopped some slop in that file and then said "Yeah that'll do, ship it", then that gives the reader information about how much the author cared about the project. If someone's first touchpoint to your project is a billboard that yells "I DIDN'T REALLY GIVE A TOSS ABOUT THIS" then don't be shocked if they don't engage.

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.

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.

> 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.

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