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Dwarf Fortress in the Browser

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Re: Dwarf Fortress in the Browser

#11
post #4

Honest question. Do people read these massive vibe-coded README.md files, or are they just artifacts? The minute I see them, I tune out and move on. These types of docs come across to me as so over-specified and memorialized that I just find it not worth the effort to read. Of course for legacy projects this type of documentation would have been invaluable. What's changed, I wonder?

We're in an era where the documentation is written to be read by LLM's, and I fully expect the README files to follow suit.

README should be written for humans. Agents don't need fancy rendering in the repository page, we do. Agents already have their own dedicated context file.

Re: Dwarf Fortress in the Browser

#12
post #10
post #4

Honest question. Do people read these massive vibe-coded README.md files, or are they just artifacts? The minute I see them, I tune out and move on. These types of docs come across to me as so over-specified and memorialized that I just find it not worth the effort to read. Of course for legacy projects this type of documentation would have been invaluable. What's changed, I wonder?

My eyes just glaze over when I see every file being listed and its purpose. Just because you CAN do that with LLMs doesn’t mean you should. What are you really trying to communicate?

I was under the impression the purpose of that is to give an LLM a cheap (in terms of context window) understanding of a repo, and not at all for the benefit of humans?

Whether that's effective is another matter, even if the LLM generating the list does so correctly and updates the list consistently

Re: Dwarf Fortress in the Browser

#13
post #9
post #4

Honest question. Do people read these massive vibe-coded README.md files, or are they just artifacts? The minute I see them, I tune out and move on. These types of docs come across to me as so over-specified and memorialized that I just find it not worth the effort to read. Of course for legacy projects this type of documentation would have been invaluable. What's changed, I wonder?

You have. The words in the file still convey useful information, but because theres a particular writing style, you've deemed the words unimportant to read. If you went to a lecture about some topic you were interested in, but as soon as the speaker started talking, they sounded gay, and then you got up to leave because you just can't stand that, is that on you or them? Because the AI culture war of it's coming to ta…

its less the tone and more the oppressive volume of text

Re: Dwarf Fortress in the Browser

#14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My eyes just glaze over when I see every file being listed and its purpose. Just because you CAN do that with LLMs doesn’t mean you should. What are you really trying to communicate?

I was under the impression the purpose of that is to give an LLM a cheap (in terms of context window) understanding of a repo, and not at all for the benefit of humans? Whether that's effective is another matter, even if the LLM generating the list does so correctly and updates the list consistently

Yes, that's for the computers to read. Maybe it's documentation that might be useful for a developer new to the project?

Re: Dwarf Fortress in the Browser

#15
post #4

Honest question. Do people read these massive vibe-coded README.md files, or are they just artifacts? The minute I see them, I tune out and move on. These types of docs come across to me as so over-specified and memorialized that I just find it not worth the effort to read. Of course for legacy projects this type of documentation would have been invaluable. What's changed, I wonder?

We're in an era where the documentation is written to be read by LLM's, and I fully expect the README files to follow suit.

If I see an excessively long README which is competing to being as long as War and Peace, I am immediately not going to read it.

This is just yet another low-effort slop specimen.

Re: Dwarf Fortress in the Browser

#17
post #4

Honest question. Do people read these massive vibe-coded README.md files, or are they just artifacts? The minute I see them, I tune out and move on. These types of docs come across to me as so over-specified and memorialized that I just find it not worth the effort to read. Of course for legacy projects this type of documentation would have been invaluable. What's changed, I wonder?

If vibey readmes are for LLMs like the other comments suggest, they should be banished to a folder where it's clear they're just for a robot so I don't have to look at them.

The README.md can actually be a reserved space for human beings to read with whatever the author thinks is most important to communicate to the human operator.

Re: Dwarf Fortress in the Browser

#19
post #4

Honest question. Do people read these massive vibe-coded README.md files, or are they just artifacts? The minute I see them, I tune out and move on. These types of docs come across to me as so over-specified and memorialized that I just find it not worth the effort to read. Of course for legacy projects this type of documentation would have been invaluable. What's changed, I wonder?

If vibey readmes are for LLMs like the other comments suggest, they should be banished to a folder where it's clear they're just for a robot so I don't have to look at them. The README.md can actually be a reserved space for human beings to read with whatever the author thinks is most important to communicate to the human operator.

Claude.md serves that purpose by standard and does not edit readme.md unless prompted so. I would keep it like that (or use another name for different agents).

Re: Dwarf Fortress in the Browser

#20
post #4

Honest question. Do people read these massive vibe-coded README.md files, or are they just artifacts? The minute I see them, I tune out and move on. These types of docs come across to me as so over-specified and memorialized that I just find it not worth the effort to read. Of course for legacy projects this type of documentation would have been invaluable. What's changed, I wonder?

Yes, they are typically pretty useful for reproducing the setup. I argue also they are superior to most human made README.md because they explain what the project is at an abstract level, use more features of GitHub Markdown to communicate, and also generate diagrams which are helpful to visualize concepts.
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