[austinpray]

It’s toxic and lazy too. You should first go look and see if the actual code is high quality/does what you want.

If your idea of shopping for dependencies is looking at the amount of GitHub stars and the quality of the documentation: you are going to miss some real diamonds in the rough.

[rosser]

Is it laziness or efficiency? It's, in my read, a heuristic (he even uses that word) for deciding whether it's worth spending time reading the docs before looking at the actual code, to see if it does what he wants.

It's about how he should best spend his time, which is finite, after all. Paid time even more so.

[Gigablah]

It’s a really bad heuristic.

I evaluate projects by (1) actually reading their source code, (2) looking up their frequency of updates and release packaging, (3) the community interaction of authors and contributors.

The total amount of effort it took to write that blog post could have been spent on submitting PRs to improve documentation of various projects.