Thread

1. anthuswilliams · 1790353553 · focus · HN ↗

   One interesting quirk of the AI-written READMEs these days is how they can include every detail on how it works, thoroughly document every optional flag, known limitation, experimental result, and still not communicate the essence of the project and the problem it solves.

   I have read through the project and I still don't understand what this thing is for and why it is to be preferred over the harness's native memory management tools.

   1. superfrank · 1790355684 · focus · HN ↗

      It’s funny to me because pre-AI it’s something I something I saw all the time managing interns and junior software engineers when I’d start trying to tech them about writing design docs. You can explain the process to them and give them a million examples of what good looks like, but for a lot of them the first few docs they write will just be this weird combo of way too much information and very little of it being useful.

      My belief has always been that they see the document as more like a test that’s a single task and not just one piece in a larger process and so they treat it like a test where there’s a right answer. They know they don’t really understand the question being asked though so they default to a mindset of, “Well if I just put everything in there some of it has to contain the correct answer” so you end up with this document that’s full of “what”s and “how”s, but completely void of “why”s.

      You’ll also often see them fill up space answering easy questions that match the structure of things that are in other documents instead of focusing on the actual hard problems in the design because the hard problems are often unique and their answers may not fit the existing patterns in the examples. There isn’t the instinct to go, “Yeah, none of these example documents talk about the servers were going to deploy it on, but this has to be deployed in an EU cluster because of GDPR laws so I need to add that” because they’re mostly just pattern matching at first.

      Usually once they’ve experienced the whole process first hand it starts to click because they start to understand where a design document fits into the larger process so they get a feel for what information matters and what doesn’t.

      I think when people just tell an agent to create a README you have the same problem because both the human and the agent see it as just a checkbox type task. The agent sees it as an isolated task snd has no fucking idea how the README is going to be used and the human isn’t giving them that context so they just spit out a bunch of stuff that’s factual and fits the patterns it knows, but is fairly useless.

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