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by bartread 739 days ago
Mmmmmmm... you have a valid point about entitlement and OSS but I'm going to also agree with GP here. Not particularly poking at this project, and the work that's gone into it, but too many projects don't have a short paragraph explaining what their purpose is and why it matters.

I'm not going to name names because I don't want to throw shade at what are essentially good or even great projects but, as a recent example, I encountered a library in our codebase the other day where I simply didn't get what the point was, and the corresponding project page and documentation - whilst really detailed in some ways - didn't help. In the end I asked ChatGPT and also found a series of video tutorials that I watched at 1.75x speed to understand it.

It was worth doing that because the thing is already used in our codebase, and it's important in that context for me to understand why and the value it adds.

But if I run across something reading an article or whatever, and it mentions some library or project in passing, I'm semi-regularly left a bit baffled as to what and why and I probably don't have the time to go digging. Nowadays I probably would ask ChatGPT for a short summary because it's so convenient and it's often quicker than Googling, and maybe I'll start submitting PRs against readme.md files to add those summaries (with a bit of editing) to the beginning of them.