[deet]

Tangentially, it's interesting seeing an open source project like this actually spin up a domain name, contact email, and some branding (the image in the Readme), for a project the author said was created in just a few days.

I wonder what the objective is for that extra polish. If it's optimizing star count growth, how much do these touches help?

[riter]

OP here.

that's a somewhat cynical interpretation. what if i just care about aesthetics and want to raise the bar.

my primary motivation was to get users of Rasa out of a directional hole bc that's where i was.

of course i like stars. it's a video game and i like winning. it was actually created in a few days all by me. no ulterior motive, literally indexing a solution to my problem from ~a week ago.

my bg is eng + product so i do these things as reflex and have a love for good UX.

nothing more. nothing less.

[rodoxcasta]

We are all crafters, and I admire the attention to these presentation points of OP. This is clear in the documentation and explanations at the repository too.

That said, I don't think the questioning of GP was malicious, just a natural curiosity. Yes, a little suspicious, but, well, we are in the internet after all. In the least, it's good to point when someone does the extra work to make a great presentation.

Anyway, great work riter!

[riter]

<3 ty, i totally misinterpreted the comment for cynicism. u guys are kind ty!

[deet]

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply any nefarious ulterior motives here.

I'm more just intellectually curious about the dynamics of Github and marketing on it these days, whether it's for attracting contributors to non-commercial OSS projects or more commercial objectives where rapid growth leads to userbase, funding, etc.

The project looks quite interesting and I agree we need a way to bridge the gap between traditional bot creation frameworks and the more LLM-centric approaches of late.

[riter]

ah! in that case glad you asked.

my objective falls into neither bucket. i want rasa users to find it so i optimize for search (GH tags, clear description), ease of use (video, addt'l MD files) and perception (logos) but i'll be honest, for my intention it has a diminishing rate of return.

at minimum i find canonical README sections like quick start, installation, how it works is necessary if you want to be helpful. helpfulness is difficult to measure outside of inbound emails thanking you / forks w/ actual commits.

hope that gives some kind of insight. just make everything awesome :)

[klibertp]

The sad truth is that it's the average README that's hilariously bad, not that you did something strange or wrong. As you say - whenever something is trying to be useful to anyone other than the author, the author should in turn try to be helpful. Unfortunately, programmers always had a love-hate relationship with documentation (love it when you need it and others wrote it for you, hate the guts of it if it's you who need to write it), but I think it got progressively worse in the last decade.

At work, I have to often seriously fight for there to even be a README. Lack of docs and docstrings, lack of meaningful comments in the code, utter lack of visualization was the norm in the 90s, then it got better for a while, and now we've done a full circle and are back with undocumented spaghetti everywhere.

It's really strange, and I don't understand why it's like this. I tell people who nominally are way past being juniors to read their code before making a PR - to see how easy to understand it is - and they look like they just got enlightened. Like, isn't this (reading your own code) the most basic of all ways of working with code? Same for READMEs, I tell them to put all the information needed for a new person to set the project up, and am met with blank stares - why would they, programmers, bother with writing down plain English and managing the information surrounding what they do? Have these guys never thought about what the "I" in "IT" means?

Sorry, that's a possibly unwarranted rant, but when I see posts like GP's that seem to assume that writing a helpful README is somehow strange and a waste of effort unless it translates into clicks, it just blows my mind, it a pretty negative way.

[riter]

LOL.

you're not alone my dude. i have a similar challenge w/ my engineers. my best lead is an artisan and its proud of what he authors, and like me sees their code as part of the product UX / funnel (1%). the others (99%) i have to get a bit draconian or simply create company templates they must adhere to or PRs get rejected and they hear from me on their 1:1s.

you either love it or you don't. and if you don't, follow the rules like a big boy or get called out.

ultimately you have to set a culture for it even if it is pulling teeth because you net net it impacts the PnL.

[dinerodiva]

I really appreciate your work on this--we have been building on rasa and looking into alt ways to use new LLM models. The question is, do we even need Rasa anymore, does it make sense given that RasaX is behind a very expensive paywall.