[piker]

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?

[mulr00ney]

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.

[lukan]

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).

[serious_angel]

Hurray! The author has re-organized the Readme making it more adequate!

- https://github.com/Sessa93/remote-df/commit/15bae297e5cad187...

Let's hope they wrote it manually, or at least re-verified the possibly re-generated "simplified" version...

[Jabrov]

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?

[flaminHotSpeedo]

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

[colechristensen]

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

[Zarathruster]

If we're fair, this is one of the better examples. It looked reasonably useful until it got to the 'CI / GitHub Actions' section. Many readmes take a very long time to describe anything useful, like how to get started or even what exactly the software is.

[yesco]

Yeah I was expecting some giant text dump based on the complaints in the comments here, yet all I see is a pretty normal README? It's not even that large.

If we are splitting hairs some sections could have been left out or broken up into a dedicated doc, but this is still vastly better than a README that explains too little. At minimum I expect a README to give me guidance on what this is and how to get started with it and having stuff like a file layout helps with exactly that.

[Thanemate]

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.

[hootz]

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.

[dgrin91]

Isn't this the whole point of an AGENTS.md file? So that you can leave the readme for humans and put LLM-friendly crap in a separate file?

[serious_angel]

Nonsense. Apologies, but please consider the infinitely magnificent world out there... and not your own echo-chambered desaturated imagination.

I've been a travelling developer at military for security services for more than two decades now, and there's not a single soul out there I know in person who would expect or claim that any documentation is not for people but machines exclusively or initially even.

A documentation, whether formatted/standardized/conventional or not, is for a human, and always will be, because this is what you leave in the history of your own work of life.

    > You can add a README file to your repository to tell other __people__ why your project is useful, what they can do with your project, and how they can use it.
    > 
    > Source: https://github.com/github/docs/blob/9af628699ba0d381fb04929a6384c70d63cef8b9/content/repositories/managing-your-repositorys-settings-and-features/customizing-your-repository/about-readmes.md

[rvz]

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.

[iwontberude]

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.

[schaefer]

It's 170 lines. that's not "massive".

[kylecazar]

Are we just saying this now for everything? The readme seems fine and is not long. The entire file is scannable in 1 minute.

[fragmede]

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 take your job, so you'd better detect when something is made by AI, otherwise you can't enjoy it. Calling out every instance where AI is slightly off is a good thing to do. Because it'll be used to make the machines better at not doing that.

Coke Zero is good these days.

[smarf]

its less the tone and more the oppressive volume of text