These modern readmes written by claude have this unusual combination of density and lack of information at the same time that I think is pretty interesting. I’ve generated many of them myself, and they largely read the same to me, without many of the distinctive “load-bearing” vocabulary tics that we see in so many places.
They seem to contain a mix of subject matter expert jargon and often some words that are created during the course of coding and end up encapsulating concepts, but it makes reading the documentation liminal — it’s like reading a tech spec from an alien. And I suppose it is, after all, a tech spec from an alien.
I think what I find both interesting and difficult and annoying (and, and, and) about them is that they fail to have a theory of mind for the reader — they are essentially the slightly manic notes one leaves for oneself after a 4 day coding binge, tarted up in markdown and published.
I’ve been experimenting with asking for documentation that specifies a reader and requests a theory of mind about that reader being applied to documentation, and it’s very helpful, but I don’t think I quite have it nailed yet. And I don’t think I understand why it is that these models, which have ingested an immense amount of technical documentation, still write like this.
> This project includes code ported / adapted from Cavern, whose licence is non-commercial and share-alike and states that any project including the code remains bound by its terms. Accordingly the entire repository is released under the Cavern licence (see LICENSE), not MIT
Finally a project where people understand that running something through and LLM doesn't strip that something of its copyright. Kudos!
These modern readmes written by claude have this unusual combination of density and lack of information at the same time that I think is pretty interesting. I’ve generated many of them myself, and they largely read the same to me, without many of the distinctive “load-bearing” vocabulary tics that we see in so many places.
They seem to contain a mix of subject matter expert jargon and often some words that are created during the course of coding and end up encapsulating concepts, but it makes reading the documentation liminal — it’s like reading a tech spec from an alien. And I suppose it is, after all, a tech spec from an alien.
I think what I find both interesting and difficult and annoying (and, and, and) about them is that they fail to have a theory of mind for the reader — they are essentially the slightly manic notes one leaves for oneself after a 4 day coding binge, tarted up in markdown and published.
I’ve been experimenting with asking for documentation that specifies a reader and requests a theory of mind about that reader being applied to documentation, and it’s very helpful, but I don’t think I quite have it nailed yet. And I don’t think I understand why it is that these models, which have ingested an immense amount of technical documentation, still write like this.
What a rare breath of sanity:
> This project includes code ported / adapted from Cavern, whose licence is non-commercial and share-alike and states that any project including the code remains bound by its terms. Accordingly the entire repository is released under the Cavern licence (see LICENSE), not MIT
Finally a project where people understand that running something through and LLM doesn't strip that something of its copyright. Kudos!