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!
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!