> But it is really hard to ignore your own biases. Of course you know that certain commands require sudo and obviously when you wrote -foo you meant --foo and everyone knows that you have to reboot afterwards.
I sometimes write readmes for myself, so that I can remember the exact steps to generate a data report, etc.
It's surprising how much they become incomprehensible after just a couple of weeks; when everything's in our head it's all clear, fluid and self-explanatory; but once we have forgotten the context, nothing makes sense anymore.
Most people don't think linguistically, we have way more conceptual thinking. What makes it difficult is we rarely realize we are thinking conceptually when writing because these concepts occur automatically and we don't notice it.
In school this lead to a lot of difficulties for me, one in writing those comments out for other people to understand, but the other seemed to be that when reading the average statements used in education for teaching I could map the same strings of language to multiple and sometimes conflicting statements because of the inexactness of the language used.
It turns out explaining concepts while leaving little room for different interpretation is hard.
I find that writing this documentation is both a "muscle" and gets better with experience.
e.g. as you both write documentation and see yourself or others use it, you start to get a feel for what people tend to understand and how to communicate it.
You can also do "dog fooding" where one person or group writes the docs and then other people follow them. If you iterate on this quickly, you can get to really good docs in a short amount of time.
The one thing I have found that really helps here, for self-directed documentation, is to write it for a modified version of yourself.
You may still be the audience. But you will be four or five years older, shit will have gone on in your life, you will have more to remember, you will be tired, you will have less patience, you will resent being forced to do archaeology on yourself, and have a dim view of the irresponsible young scamp who thinks he has an excellent memory that you are right now.
Write for that person and your documentation will be better.
(As you may be able to tell, I am now that person. And I fear there are two more cycles of this to go)
My boss gives me shit regularly for not remembering things. He doesn’t seem to understand that when you manage environments in all three clouds, storage arrays in four different countries from different manufacturers, four on prem virtual clusters, Active Directory, entra, etc that you can’t remember everything all the time if you haven’t touched it in a while.
I started a daily journal when my team’s workload got to be so much that we can’t remember everything. It helps, but even going back to it weeks later there were things I did not write down because I assumed I’d remember them later.
I’ve since gotten better at being more comprehensive, and trying to think in the “how to make a sandwich” way of instruction. I’m not being condescending to my future self, I know my future self has too much shit to mange to remember it all.
My new test is to ask an LLM questions about the documentation and see if it gets correct answers. I wonder if this will become a common QA step for the docs at some point, it's very useful for finding gaps in the docs or things that are unclear.
>I hadn't actually explained what the software would do.
Half the posts I see lately are like, "Gleam 2.0. What we learned" and then you go to the homepage and it's "Gleam is a Tribble for your Fork! (Scroll down) See if you qualify for Gleam Enterprise!"
I recently had this experience with hotjar [0]. I _already use hotjar_ and still struggled to understand the page lol
If somebody from hotjar/cintentsquare sees this, I’d prefer if your page was more straightforward about the name change. Maybe try “we’ve rebranded to content square”
I was confused by your mention of "Gleam", but I suppose it is just a generic name, not referring to Gleam [0], the functional programming language, as the latter is an example of a project that focuses on concise and minimalist documentation (btw, its README is just a reference to the website).
Now imagine living in San Francisco where you see this shit on every bus ad and billboard. Except these days they’re all “Tribbling. With agents. gleam.ai”
I think I read somewhere (and in any case it matches my experience) that the first user will catch 50% of the problems and that with 5 users you can catch close to 90%. So human testing is not just invaluable, it's pretty cheap for the benefits it brings.
I was also going to post "this sounds like usability/user research".
But I guess we all re-discover things when we need to.
The biggest issue I've seen with tech docs is often expert users of a given tool or product are enlisted to write the docs, because of their expertise.
But then ironically they end up writing those docs for an audience that shares their level of expertise, rather than for the intended audience.
So you end up with lots of assumptions or leaps of logic in the docs that the intended audience can't follow.
I'd wager this is interesting, seems there are a lot of users here building things on the side (or main projects) that need clear UX if they're anything like me, they don't have that UX background to know the best practices. I know I just clicked your link anyway...
> I hadn't actually explained what the software would do.
I cannot tell you how many READMEs I've read that follow the pattern: "<uninformative-name> is a <buzzword> <buzzword> written in <language>." I only have some semblance of what it does after using/seeing a demo; too often one that isnt available through the README.
The other variant is "Foo is an alternative to bar". While it could work in the niche you are in and it is totally fine to not target people outside of it, it could be really hard to get into.
I love this. Most readmes are plain bad. I think the most egregious is when a readme doesn't state what the project does. I get that not every project is aimed at the public, but if you go through the bother of creating a readme file, why not go the extra 10 centimeters by writing the most basic information?
Other issues:
* outdated (and thereby wrong) information
* using un-introduced abbreviations (bonus points for abbreviations that have common meanings, e.g.: EG, NB, IE, ETC)
There are a number of (newish) AI projects on GitHub whose README make zero sense. I would read it three times but still have no idea what it does.
If your project is aimed at average developers yet someone with professional software engineering experience like me cannot understand it, sorry I'm not going to use it.
> using un-introduced abbreviations (bonus points for abbreviations that have common meanings, e.g.: EG, NB, IE, ETC)
Every company should give their new employees a list of in-company invented words and abbreviations, so that you don't search for them online and then feel like an idiot for not being able to find them. Especially when the older employees use them as if they are common knowledge.
Humans are great, but AI can really help here too. Let me explain :)
I write docs that AI agents have to follow to play a game through an API, then spin up 20 sub-agents each with their own identities / properties etc. and watch where they fail. They get stuck in the same places as humans..
or they will point out the "obvious" steps not explicitly mentioned.
now where the AI tests start to fall apart is that an agent doesn’t tell you the doc is confusing, it just does something wrong with full confidence. A person on a call says “wait, what?” and that’s worth the 25 euros :)
This sounds exactly like UX usability testing. Sit down with someone and watch them work through whatever process you’ve created.
It’s normal to compensate them for their time.
Normally though you don’t modify it after each participant. But for something very niche like following a README (as opposed to an e-commerce flow targeted to the general population) it might be fine, if less rigorous.
To a certain extent, you can think of writing documentation like writing code. Leverage your coding skills to improve your explanatory writing.
Each phrase or sentence is an operation that changes the state. The state is the mind of the reader. For it to work, you have to understand the starting state, and then construct a valid sequence that modifies the state step by step until it reaches the desired state. Every step has preconditions and postconditions. You can't leave important values uninitialized. You can't refer to symbols that haven't been defined. You can't just sit down and blurt out whatever comes to mind; you have to "play computer" (or "play reader") in your head to model the effects of what you're writing. You need to be aware of which "platform" you're targeting (developers, users) and understand quirks of each variation of that platform. Some of your operations might fail, and you may need a way to detect and/or recover.
Obviously don't take it too far and reduce writing to this. But I think it's helpful for getting into a mindset where you are thinking about communication in an end-to-end, closed-loop way. Your mind needs to be engaged and stay engaged with the question of what the experience is like for the reader. It's very easy to default to an open-loop mode where you just have a random string of thoughts about the subject, let your brain translate them into words, write that down, and call it done. There's a big difference between expressing thoughts and communicating ideas effectively.
Thinking about it this way could also maybe help with motivation. It's satisfying to write computer code and really nail it and have it do its job effectively, right? You can get a similar feeling of satisfaction from good writing.
> My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.
I used to write technical documents in prose style, sometimes with meandering stories. I guess I picked it up from my early blogging days. I realized I hated reading some of them back. So I tried to keep it cut and dried. I do sometimes sprinkle a bit of colorful wording just to add a bit of humanity but only if it doesn't get in the way of the main message.
I'm glad the author mentioned this particular learning. Even if you do enjoy reading your own jokes, many other people will find them at best annoying and at worst confusing. When you add in people from other language/culture backgrounds the risk/reward of jokes gets even worse!
There was a famous conflict over rms's joke about the abort() function in the glibc manual[0], which said:
> Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program.
I think that joke illustrates nicely what I mean: it would only have made sense to people in USA, and would have just confused others. Even those who understood it would - IMHO - most likely not appreciate it being in the glibc manual. People don't read manuals to be entertained - they read them to find out as quickly as possible how to get their work done.
> "They were the ones who caught the mistakes that no spell chequer could."
I thought that maybe "spell chequer" was the valid British term, which would be interesting, so I searched but it isn't. It turns out that the joke here is that "chequer" is a valid British word, so a word-based spell checker won't flag "spell chequer", so it's self-referential. I see why people found his jokes actively confusing.
When deciding on a style for documentation, I typically draw the line between tutorials and references. The linear top-down flow of an introductory guide lends itself well to inserting additional context throughout it even if not completely on-topic, while in an API or hardware reference you generally want to keep each section reasonably self-contained, trivially searchable for (minimizing false hits by carefully choosing keywords) and readable independently of the others. I have found the literate programming approach [1] of writing entire tutorials as code to work pretty well for this purpose, which I've used to great effect in some of my pet projects [2].
Being short and concise is usually the better way.
I tend to be too verbose in writing as I want to explain the context in more detail, but short, accurate, concise is best. Many developers fail at that too, though. Many projects do not have working examples. That annoys me the most. It sends a message of "I don't care about new users learning how to use my project".
When I was testing my books' instructions, I would operate from a fresh state and only allow copy paste. Every single command and line of code had to be expressed and in the correct order.
This was generally really a good way to go about it, because it requires everything to be correct with no room for adjustment.
Still people would miss things, but it always came from skipping instructions (sometimes completely.) Maybe 10 support inquiries total.
Most documentation reads like you should already know what you’re doing, which makes sense because it was written by someone who already knows how to do the process.
I think good technical writing requires the same skills as good product ownership, that is empathy for the user and their perspective. Often technical writing is an after thought and not someone’s whole role and it really shows.
I know there are some great README's (and other documents) around, that document best-practices or templates for great README's. I found one that looked very useful and would've sworn I starred the repo to find it again in time of need. Alas, can't find it. Anyone has some good resources to point to, to add to this thread?
Update: Found some related HN threads (omitted link-rotted submissions).
> My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.
2real4me
In all seriousness tho, I don't really put jokes in readmes or code comments. Jokes should be tied to a moment where they make sense, not just be present in perpetuum. Slack is great for jokes, or maybe even a notion design doc comment, alongside the actual feedback.
But sticking jokes in your readme just feels like "I have you here for other reasons, now you have to listen to me be funny".
There's a zeroth step missing from both the Quickstart and Full Set Up: install php-fpm, configure it, and configure your http server to serve using it as a backend.
It seems to be taken for granted — that's something you'd already have in place if you're already serving applications in PHP, but would have to figure out on your own if you haven't served anything in PHP so far in your life.
It's a tricky problem. How far back in the stack do you go? The README assumes that you know how to use git to check out the files - or that you can easily save them from the repository. Should it include that as a step in the tutorial?
As I say in the linked article, it depends on what sort of user you have. For a "getting started with Raspberry Pi" document, you might well want to include how to insert an SD card etc.
I'll have a think about the best way to help people figure out if they're running PHP. Thanks for the feedback!
Even as someone working with PHP I would prefer if the project provides we with some guidelines for setup. Especially if it requires some specific version or extension. Ideally the whole dev environment should be containerized. Then you would again require people to understand and use that layer, but depending on the projects complexity definitely something to consider to make it easier to work with
Documentation is so important. I have been treating documentation in the same way I handle code. I found mkdocs works pretty well and integrated with a github job that updates the docs when I commit changes to my main branch. It also allows contributors to correct errors or add helpful instructions to documents. I think I have not paid enough attention to my biases though and like the idea of hiring someone to go through the process. I think my instructions are sound but maybe not so much for a user who is not as familiar as I am. I may not be doing things the optimal way but I have used a lot of documentation over the years and feel what I have done addresses gripes I have had with "Big Tech" provided docs.
mkdocs still uses "web fonts" for icons. This hack was required for compatibility with Internet Explorer, but is just cargo-culting these days. It's an accessibility issue in that users who disable web fonts (for readability) don't see icons, they just see unicode placeholders everywhere ("tofu").
We most times forget that not everyone can read our minds or see exactly what we see in our systems. When it comes to communicating ideas, there's always the requirement to actually communicate what it is the readers needs to know.
I oftentimes find myself spending more time rewriting readmes than writing code.
Treat the readme like a journey/walkthrough of your product, follow an order, and keep it simple to understand.
I build apps with Claude Code, and I test them by having the AI click through the UI with Playwright. That's enough to check that things work as specified and nothing is broken.
But I think the purpose is different when an AI tries it and when a person tries it. To put it in extreme terms, AI is for UI and people are for UX. People find UI problems too, though: in my music player, songs got blocked from playing in Safari on a real iPad, and I only found it by using it myself. The things found in this article, like the jokes that didn't land or not knowing what the tool even does, are on the side only people can find.
(I wrote this in Japanese and used AI to translate it.)
Does the author aware the blog is unreadable on Firefox mobile? I might have something wrong on my phone too, but I don't have an issue with anything else.. https://imgur.com/a/ctriVnD
Yes. The amount of projects that don't just run is outstanding. Luckily docker container projects are inherently better at this is in terms of dependencies, but there are still often weird assumptions or medical incantations to get them during.
LLMs are also good for this; point them at your repo and ask them to do a fresh install and note all friction. One time when the lack of context really helps.
Not related to a README, but very much related to how programmers / creators speak (by which I mean type).
My way in to WordPress support back in 2004 was decoding answers to others from Photomatt and others.
A user would ask a question about WordPress and, for example, Photomatt would answer. His answer was always correct. Technically correct. But it didn't land for the question asker. They would reply with .. 'What?'
I would then replay with "What Matt has said is right, and this is what he means, this is the answer"
I gave them the information they needed in words they could understand.
It was not Matt's fault, it was not the user's fault.
Same thing happened to me. The install command in my project's README was broken for one release. I didn't see it because it worked on my computer. I only found it when I tried on a new machine. Now we run that exact command automatically before every release.
The link says "My opinion is that FAQs pose a problem only when there’s no strategy around their usage." Calling them "problematic" based on that seems like an exaggeration
"They were the ones who caught the mistakes that no spell chequer could."
Nice, good article lol. I appreciate a joke or two in a readme but totally understand the annoyance, I think forgetting to actually say what the software does is super common as well though. Often trying to figure out if something found on github will actually solve a problem only to be met with a list of install commands.
The 'look awesome project with funky name, here's how to install off you go' without a word to what one earth it actually does is amazingly common. Plenty of things posted here I bounce away from after hitting the linked page, finding something someone is obviously very proud of, but not having a clue what it's actually about :p
What I love bout this is how closely it hews to the principles of design research. Same principles, applied deeper in the experience as LLMs make things more accessible than no code, or CMS before that.
All people creating, need to speak to other people. Loved reading this.
Also - formalize what can be. There may be e.g. opportunities to write scripts that can be tested and linted. I realize this isn't always possible, but I do think it should be ruled out rather than ignored.
Support: "it doesn't work in that situation. Here's a link to our documentation with two dozen bullet points about where and when that feature doesn't work".
It's as if you selected a cell in Excel, and the copy-paste buttons were missing, and you raised a support case with Microsoft and they said "copy-paste does not work if your spreadsheet was opened from a NAS share. It's documented here that it doesn't work: <link>".
That is documentation as a defense, instead of the company putting in the effort to make the thing work, they put in documentation that it doesn't work so they can blame the user who "won't read the documentation".
Somewhat related question: what is it about READMEs that AI agents love to dump the most useless, hard to contextualise & comprehend, irrelevant rubbish into them that makes understanding a project and onboarding so hard?
It feels like like the AI agents can't help themselves sometimes, and the judgement exercised around what's included and omitted is baffling.
But maybe READMEs have always been this bad, and AI agents have raised the baseline?
That sounds pretty similar to what I get from LLMs regardless of what they're writing for. Any time I get more than a paragraph out from an LLM, it tends to have of a lot of irrelevant details or unnecessary hedging, and I have to either wade through it to find the actual answer or try to convince it to make it more direct.
As someone on the spectrum, this does happen to me with people sometimes too; I struggle when asking a question and getting an answer that doesn't fit the "shape" of what I expect (e.g. asking a yes or no question and getting a relatively long sentence in response that doesn't contain either "yes" or "no" in it, which means I need to do the equivalent of applying it as a diff to my mental model and seeing if there are conflicts). This happens less frequently with other humans though, and on average the amount of effort I need try to figure out what they're saying is a lot lower. This doesn't make it less frustrating when I get that kind of output from an LLM, but it doesn't surprise me all that much that it happens.
I'm sure I do this all the time to people too, though. One of the biggest lessons I've learned in the past several years is that I communicate in ways that I'd probably have trouble understanding in reverse a lot more frequently than I realized, even I still do the things I find confusing from others less often than most people I interact with. I'm sure a lot of people might find this comment to be pretty much exactly like what I'm complaining about even though I feel fairly confident at least in this moment that my point is clear.
Indeed, these make me back out of a project immediately if I don’t have a strong need to use it, and it takes extra cognitive effort to ignore the emojis and focus on the actually meaningful text.
Now we have new ways to solve this problem: send Haiku or Luna to do task using computer use, but without access to code. If it can't complete it, or takes too long, docs are bad.
Given the agents.md I’m assuming the readme was just spit out by an LLM and the goal was to not read as LLM text. Problem is, it reads like you prompted it to be written in more simple language.
I just find it a bit misleading that you’re saying you want to talk to real people all while trying to clean up AI slop.
> My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.
Confession time.
I used to be prone to giving things slightly silly names, particularly unrecoverable structured exceptions. Examples include PancakeLandingException, ReallyBadException, CataclysmicException, ApocalypticDeathException, and the like.
And then years and years ago I used to work for a company called Redgate and I started a tradition of slightly silly messages when early access builds of our .NET products would expire, all based on Monty Python sketches and quotes. So, obviously, the dead parrot sketch featured in there.
So far, so harmless, but this did come to a head somewhat spectacularly and in a couple of different ways.
Firstly, in 2009 one of my colleagues used a modified quote from The Life of Brian as an expiry message on a build. Somebody who appeared to be some sort of religious zealot complained loudly to the company. We were both in LA at the time, with a couple of other colleagues, attending build 2009, so we woke up to a chain of something like 50 panicked emails in our inboxes with people expressing differing levels of outrage and/or amusement whilst discussing various grovelling apology options... until someone figured out that it was actually an elaborate troll that we'd swallowed hook, line, and sinker. I can't remember the name of the person who caught us out but, hats off, well played, sir, well played. It did unfortunately mean we became a bit more cautious and business-like with our early access build expiry messages.
Secondly, and this one needs a bit of context setting... I've always been a fan of descriptive and explicit error messages: there should be enough information in any error message that most of the time the user can figure out what's wrong and fix their own problem OR at least so that if they get in touch with support, then support can quickly figure out the problem and get back to them with a solution. I'm not a fan of unhelpful, information poor, obfuscatory, or cryptic error messages.
But when I wanted to cause an application to exit because there'd been an error related to tampering with our licensing code I played somewhat against type. I wanted error messages that would uniquely identify what had happened, making it easy for us to figure out, whilst giving the user no clue (because I wanted to make it very slightly harder for hackers/crackers - but let's be real: this would never have actually stopped anyone). So I used successive lines of dialogue from a scene in House where House is trying to guess who Wilson's girlfriend is. I have no clear recollection of why I chose this dialogue to reproduce, but... I did.
Anyway, this did lead to some slightly confused support requests coming in from users mostly trying to use the tools legitimately in slightly unusual scenarios, but nothing that was overly burdensome. That was until early 2011, when Greg Young - he of event sourcing fame - posted the following gist because he'd encountered an error that said, "Because I wanna ask you about your girlfriend. I must know who she is, or you would've told me her name.": https://gist.github.com/gregoryyoung/871736.
Not at all creepy, right? And, of course, it went viral on twitter. Cue another massive email thread although, this time round, people just thought it was funny. However, we did decide to make the error messages a bit more boring and, in the end, I just gave them numbers.
Mostly I'm just glad the error Greg got wasn't the final line of dialogue in the exchange between House and Wilson: "Yo mamma." That would have been bad.
The 'fake error messages to thwart crackers' thing is pretty relatable - I think back in my day I went with 'early-exit trap (#23)' or the likes for this type of error condition. It does help that we didn't have any phone support - numbers would potentially be painful that way! Another common one I see is dictionary words though even something neutral like 'anteater' or 'weasel' or 'high-jig-south' can both be frustrating to see as a user as well as when trying to deal with support for the inevitable case an integrity check fails on real systems...
In general, software is still Beta if a program requires a readme file to install and use.
It is under 5 minutes to write a shell/bat/make/cmake script for each platform to configure library requirements, import OS specific data, and enable GPU/NPU features. Then run through the application build, installation package with stripped performance build, and or a few regression tests.
Lets say you have 4k downloads a month on a small project, and it takes 1 hour for each admin to read/configure. You just saved about 5 years of your users lives reading your document. =3
Many devs love to shit on the guy from the 'I just want the exe. Why is there no exe'? meme. On some level I get it. And in some cases it's not even reasonable to provide a single binary or whatever. But on the other hand, github is being used to deliver end-user software. It is no longer just a dev's workspace/playground. That and the amount of makefiles and python scripts I've seen fail due to some dependency nonsense fills me with rage. It's never Just™ typing 'make' unless the code is trivial. I can wade through the bullshit. I shouldn't have to, and many others aren't even able to.
>But it is really hard to ignore your own biases. Of course you know that certain commands require sudo and obviously when you wrote -foo you meant --foo and everyone knows that you have to reboot afterwards.
For God's sake, this is not "biases," wtf?? That's straight up just not reading/following the document you're supposed to be testing/reviewing. When I test my documents I actually follow them exactly, step by step, and I always catch these sorts of mistakes. Always. I always copy/paste commands because I know that is what the customer will do, so I have to make sure that works flawlessly.
Dude, if you actually follow your own document, you don't have to pay people to do it for you. Also, you can make sure the person you are paying doesn't ignore the document like you apparently do.
I stopped reading, I'm not interested in whatever else this dude has to say. I'm literally flabbergasted.
Maybe it's because my documents have always gone to real paying customers who have to get through this install, and not some hobby project I'm super proud of or whatever and I don't think I'm super clever? Idk.
Writing good documentation is difficult. From those who say
"the source code explains everything", I think 80% are too
lazy to write documentation in the first place.
Having said that, I found consistently that when a project
has working examples, ideally documented a bit, aka explained,
they tend to work much better than those projects that have
no examples. Working examples often also help get into a project
quickly and check out how it works. It helps to learn too.
READMEs are not useless, of course, but the quality varies a lot.
I also know of folks who use AI slop spam to improve it, but while
it may improve a little bit, it generates a lot of horribly to read
text that makes no sense. I am noticing this with the ruby core dev
team - they (almost) all suddenly have perfect language skills but it
is more like an advanced babelfish translator. What they piece together
here makes no sense. Claude in particular is now famous for this slop
content. And I don't understand what it is used: real people read any
of this AI slop? Because I just skip it or filter it away these days.
>From those who say "the source code explains everything"
Because theoretically you should be able to describe not only your entire application logic, but upper and lower bounds of inputs as well. Good code would describe this inherently.
Documentation is only useful when a) the application is not source available, so you have no choice, b) you want to save a human developer time for them to understand your code, or c) you want to use documentation as a cache hit for agent use (less token spend)
> I know someone is going to say "why not just ask an LLM to simulate a range of users?" The answer is very simple - I want to speak to real people. People are brilliant! They can make you laugh, you can see their cat when it wanders on to the call, they bring a unique perspective to the problem, and they're really happy when you give them a €25 voucher. Some will gladly do it for free and make you happy!
So what the author actually paid for was to interact with humans and the README checking was secondary - because, really, my own first thought was literally to ask an LLM check and try to follow the instructions in the README and pretty much any decent LLM (including several local ones) would be able to check if they're adequate and even suggest improvements (just don't let them write it for you :-P).
Agents and people catch different things. My agent reviewers find real bugs, like pinch-zoom breaking while a finger is on the joystick. But none of them said "this is boring". I did, on my phone, when I walked my character up to a house and nothing happened.
I know, I know: It's complicated. But have you heard of AI agents?
But I just onboarded 4 interns on a project where all they had to do was
1. Install the Nix package manager
2. Install direnv, enter the project repo, and `direnv allow`
3. Toolchain, git hooks, MCP servers, in-repo issue tracker, everything is available
Our project manager requested information that was available in the issue tracker. I told her, she could get all her answers by asking our agent, and it'd automatically reference the issue tracker. I figured I'd just need to show her how to install the Nix package manager. But no, she already had it because another project by another team depended on it.
Putting wrong information is README is so outdated when you have programmatic setup of your entire toolchain.
> But it is really hard to ignore your own biases. Of course you know that certain commands require sudo and obviously when you wrote -foo you meant --foo and everyone knows that you have to reboot afterwards.
I sometimes write readmes for myself, so that I can remember the exact steps to generate a data report, etc.
It's surprising how much they become incomprehensible after just a couple of weeks; when everything's in our head it's all clear, fluid and self-explanatory; but once we have forgotten the context, nothing makes sense anymore.
Most people don't think linguistically, we have way more conceptual thinking. What makes it difficult is we rarely realize we are thinking conceptually when writing because these concepts occur automatically and we don't notice it.
In school this lead to a lot of difficulties for me, one in writing those comments out for other people to understand, but the other seemed to be that when reading the average statements used in education for teaching I could map the same strings of language to multiple and sometimes conflicting statements because of the inexactness of the language used.
It turns out explaining concepts while leaving little room for different interpretation is hard.
I find that writing this documentation is both a "muscle" and gets better with experience.
e.g. as you both write documentation and see yourself or others use it, you start to get a feel for what people tend to understand and how to communicate it.
You can also do "dog fooding" where one person or group writes the docs and then other people follow them. If you iterate on this quickly, you can get to really good docs in a short amount of time.
That's why having a long shell history is so great, you can just scroll back further to get more context, because it really captured everything.
The one thing I have found that really helps here, for self-directed documentation, is to write it for a modified version of yourself.
You may still be the audience. But you will be four or five years older, shit will have gone on in your life, you will have more to remember, you will be tired, you will have less patience, you will resent being forced to do archaeology on yourself, and have a dim view of the irresponsible young scamp who thinks he has an excellent memory that you are right now.
Write for that person and your documentation will be better.
(As you may be able to tell, I am now that person. And I fear there are two more cycles of this to go)
My boss gives me shit regularly for not remembering things. He doesn’t seem to understand that when you manage environments in all three clouds, storage arrays in four different countries from different manufacturers, four on prem virtual clusters, Active Directory, entra, etc that you can’t remember everything all the time if you haven’t touched it in a while.
I started a daily journal when my team’s workload got to be so much that we can’t remember everything. It helps, but even going back to it weeks later there were things I did not write down because I assumed I’d remember them later.
I’ve since gotten better at being more comprehensive, and trying to think in the “how to make a sandwich” way of instruction. I’m not being condescending to my future self, I know my future self has too much shit to mange to remember it all.
My new test is to ask an LLM questions about the documentation and see if it gets correct answers. I wonder if this will become a common QA step for the docs at some point, it's very useful for finding gaps in the docs or things that are unclear.
>I hadn't actually explained what the software would do.
Half the posts I see lately are like, "Gleam 2.0. What we learned" and then you go to the homepage and it's "Gleam is a Tribble for your Fork! (Scroll down) See if you qualify for Gleam Enterprise!"
It’s a bit funny how normalized this is. Surely being more clear would provide some market advantage?
Or perhaps not, if folks who need a Tribble for their Fork achieve instant enlightenment upon reading the marketing copy.
It also happens with marketing emails, or (worse) waiting lists: "great news, we're live!" -- Who the heck are you again?
I recently had this experience with hotjar [0]. I _already use hotjar_ and still struggled to understand the page lol
If somebody from hotjar/cintentsquare sees this, I’d prefer if your page was more straightforward about the name change. Maybe try “we’ve rebranded to content square”
[0] https://contentsquare.com/hotjar/
I hate marketing websites especially for developer products.
“You no longer have to florp, now you can vorp!”
Big numbers, random charts. 10x 100x 200x!
Who is this for? Just make the docs the home page.
I was confused by your mention of "Gleam", but I suppose it is just a generic name, not referring to Gleam [0], the functional programming language, as the latter is an example of a project that focuses on concise and minimalist documentation (btw, its README is just a reference to the website).
[0] https://gleam.run/
(Updated the text as the downvotes indicated people misunderstood what I wrote. I agree about OP's observation)
Now imagine living in San Francisco where you see this shit on every bus ad and billboard. Except these days they’re all “Tribbling. With agents. gleam.ai”
This is very close to what you call usability testing in the field of UX design.
The Nielson Norman Group has a good introduction to this: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/usability-testing-101/
Is this interesting to people on HN?
I majored in a mix between coding and design.
I think I read somewhere (and in any case it matches my experience) that the first user will catch 50% of the problems and that with 5 users you can catch close to 90%. So human testing is not just invaluable, it's pretty cheap for the benefits it brings.
There's the famous quip that Steve Jobs hated focus groups. What people miss is that he (and Apple overall) was heavy on UX testing.
I was also going to post "this sounds like usability/user research".
But I guess we all re-discover things when we need to.
The biggest issue I've seen with tech docs is often expert users of a given tool or product are enlisted to write the docs, because of their expertise.
But then ironically they end up writing those docs for an audience that shares their level of expertise, rather than for the intended audience.
So you end up with lots of assumptions or leaps of logic in the docs that the intended audience can't follow.
I'd wager this is interesting, seems there are a lot of users here building things on the side (or main projects) that need clear UX if they're anything like me, they don't have that UX background to know the best practices. I know I just clicked your link anyway...
Yes very much so and thanks for the link.
> I hadn't actually explained what the software would do.
I cannot tell you how many READMEs I've read that follow the pattern: "<uninformative-name> is a <buzzword> <buzzword> written in <language>." I only have some semblance of what it does after using/seeing a demo; too often one that isnt available through the README.
The other variant is "Foo is an alternative to bar". While it could work in the niche you are in and it is totally fine to not target people outside of it, it could be really hard to get into.
I love this. Most readmes are plain bad. I think the most egregious is when a readme doesn't state what the project does. I get that not every project is aimed at the public, but if you go through the bother of creating a readme file, why not go the extra 10 centimeters by writing the most basic information? Other issues: * outdated (and thereby wrong) information * using un-introduced abbreviations (bonus points for abbreviations that have common meanings, e.g.: EG, NB, IE, ETC)
There are a number of (newish) AI projects on GitHub whose README make zero sense. I would read it three times but still have no idea what it does.
If your project is aimed at average developers yet someone with professional software engineering experience like me cannot understand it, sorry I'm not going to use it.
> using un-introduced abbreviations (bonus points for abbreviations that have common meanings, e.g.: EG, NB, IE, ETC)
Every company should give their new employees a list of in-company invented words and abbreviations, so that you don't search for them online and then feel like an idiot for not being able to find them. Especially when the older employees use them as if they are common knowledge.
Could have used extra 1 centimeter to format the comment's list properly. :)
> go the extra 10 cm
Going to steal this
Humans are great, but AI can really help here too. Let me explain :)
I write docs that AI agents have to follow to play a game through an API, then spin up 20 sub-agents each with their own identities / properties etc. and watch where they fail. They get stuck in the same places as humans.. or they will point out the "obvious" steps not explicitly mentioned.
now where the AI tests start to fall apart is that an agent doesn’t tell you the doc is confusing, it just does something wrong with full confidence. A person on a call says “wait, what?” and that’s worth the 25 euros :)
This used to be called "I hired QA people to identify gaps in my project", but hey now it has become paying people to follow readme
This sounds exactly like UX usability testing. Sit down with someone and watch them work through whatever process you’ve created.
It’s normal to compensate them for their time.
Normally though you don’t modify it after each participant. But for something very niche like following a README (as opposed to an e-commerce flow targeted to the general population) it might be fine, if less rigorous.
To a certain extent, you can think of writing documentation like writing code. Leverage your coding skills to improve your explanatory writing.
Each phrase or sentence is an operation that changes the state. The state is the mind of the reader. For it to work, you have to understand the starting state, and then construct a valid sequence that modifies the state step by step until it reaches the desired state. Every step has preconditions and postconditions. You can't leave important values uninitialized. You can't refer to symbols that haven't been defined. You can't just sit down and blurt out whatever comes to mind; you have to "play computer" (or "play reader") in your head to model the effects of what you're writing. You need to be aware of which "platform" you're targeting (developers, users) and understand quirks of each variation of that platform. Some of your operations might fail, and you may need a way to detect and/or recover.
Obviously don't take it too far and reduce writing to this. But I think it's helpful for getting into a mindset where you are thinking about communication in an end-to-end, closed-loop way. Your mind needs to be engaged and stay engaged with the question of what the experience is like for the reader. It's very easy to default to an open-loop mode where you just have a random string of thoughts about the subject, let your brain translate them into words, write that down, and call it done. There's a big difference between expressing thoughts and communicating ideas effectively.
Thinking about it this way could also maybe help with motivation. It's satisfying to write computer code and really nail it and have it do its job effectively, right? You can get a similar feeling of satisfaction from good writing.
> My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.
I used to write technical documents in prose style, sometimes with meandering stories. I guess I picked it up from my early blogging days. I realized I hated reading some of them back. So I tried to keep it cut and dried. I do sometimes sprinkle a bit of colorful wording just to add a bit of humanity but only if it doesn't get in the way of the main message.
I'm glad the author mentioned this particular learning. Even if you do enjoy reading your own jokes, many other people will find them at best annoying and at worst confusing. When you add in people from other language/culture backgrounds the risk/reward of jokes gets even worse!
There was a famous conflict over rms's joke about the abort() function in the glibc manual[0], which said:
> Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program.
I think that joke illustrates nicely what I mean: it would only have made sense to people in USA, and would have just confused others. Even those who understood it would - IMHO - most likely not appreciate it being in the glibc manual. People don't read manuals to be entertained - they read them to find out as quickly as possible how to get their work done.
[0] https://lwn.net/Articles/770966/
> "They were the ones who caught the mistakes that no spell chequer could."
I thought that maybe "spell chequer" was the valid British term, which would be interesting, so I searched but it isn't. It turns out that the joke here is that "chequer" is a valid British word, so a word-based spell checker won't flag "spell chequer", so it's self-referential. I see why people found his jokes actively confusing.
When deciding on a style for documentation, I typically draw the line between tutorials and references. The linear top-down flow of an introductory guide lends itself well to inserting additional context throughout it even if not completely on-topic, while in an API or hardware reference you generally want to keep each section reasonably self-contained, trivially searchable for (minimizing false hits by carefully choosing keywords) and readable independently of the others. I have found the literate programming approach [1] of writing entire tutorials as code to work pretty well for this purpose, which I've used to great effect in some of my pet projects [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literate_programming
[2] https://github.com/spicyjpeg/ps1-bare-metal
> My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.
Well, I found that sentence in the post was very funny ;-)
isnt this what footnotes are for?
Being short and concise is usually the better way.
I tend to be too verbose in writing as I want to explain the context in more detail, but short, accurate, concise is best. Many developers fail at that too, though. Many projects do not have working examples. That annoys me the most. It sends a message of "I don't care about new users learning how to use my project".
When I was testing my books' instructions, I would operate from a fresh state and only allow copy paste. Every single command and line of code had to be expressed and in the correct order.
This was generally really a good way to go about it, because it requires everything to be correct with no room for adjustment.
Still people would miss things, but it always came from skipping instructions (sometimes completely.) Maybe 10 support inquiries total.
Most README files should include a screenshot.
Even if it is a command-line tool, a screenshot helps provide a better understanding of what to expect.
Turns out a picture is worth a thousand words.
Most documentation reads like you should already know what you’re doing, which makes sense because it was written by someone who already knows how to do the process.
I think good technical writing requires the same skills as good product ownership, that is empathy for the user and their perspective. Often technical writing is an after thought and not someone’s whole role and it really shows.
Good article
I know there are some great README's (and other documents) around, that document best-practices or templates for great README's. I found one that looked very useful and would've sworn I starred the repo to find it again in time of need. Alas, can't find it. Anyone has some good resources to point to, to add to this thread?
Update: Found some related HN threads (omitted link-rotted submissions).
- I'd like to review your README https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26842191 (91 comments)
- Readme.so – Easiest Way to Create a Readme https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27006740 (65 comments)
- Readme Driven Development https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1627246 (57 comments)
Theres a GitHub repo called awsome readmes
> My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.
2real4me
In all seriousness tho, I don't really put jokes in readmes or code comments. Jokes should be tied to a moment where they make sense, not just be present in perpetuum. Slack is great for jokes, or maybe even a notion design doc comment, alongside the actual feedback.
But sticking jokes in your readme just feels like "I have you here for other reasons, now you have to listen to me be funny".
There's a zeroth step missing from both the Quickstart and Full Set Up: install php-fpm, configure it, and configure your http server to serve using it as a backend.
It seems to be taken for granted — that's something you'd already have in place if you're already serving applications in PHP, but would have to figure out on your own if you haven't served anything in PHP so far in your life.
It's a tricky problem. How far back in the stack do you go? The README assumes that you know how to use git to check out the files - or that you can easily save them from the repository. Should it include that as a step in the tutorial?
As I say in the linked article, it depends on what sort of user you have. For a "getting started with Raspberry Pi" document, you might well want to include how to insert an SD card etc.
I'll have a think about the best way to help people figure out if they're running PHP. Thanks for the feedback!
Even as someone working with PHP I would prefer if the project provides we with some guidelines for setup. Especially if it requires some specific version or extension. Ideally the whole dev environment should be containerized. Then you would again require people to understand and use that layer, but depending on the projects complexity definitely something to consider to make it easier to work with
Documentation is so important. I have been treating documentation in the same way I handle code. I found mkdocs works pretty well and integrated with a github job that updates the docs when I commit changes to my main branch. It also allows contributors to correct errors or add helpful instructions to documents. I think I have not paid enough attention to my biases though and like the idea of hiring someone to go through the process. I think my instructions are sound but maybe not so much for a user who is not as familiar as I am. I may not be doing things the optimal way but I have used a lot of documentation over the years and feel what I have done addresses gripes I have had with "Big Tech" provided docs.
mkdocs still uses "web fonts" for icons. This hack was required for compatibility with Internet Explorer, but is just cargo-culting these days. It's an accessibility issue in that users who disable web fonts (for readability) don't see icons, they just see unicode placeholders everywhere ("tofu").
We most times forget that not everyone can read our minds or see exactly what we see in our systems. When it comes to communicating ideas, there's always the requirement to actually communicate what it is the readers needs to know.
I oftentimes find myself spending more time rewriting readmes than writing code.
Treat the readme like a journey/walkthrough of your product, follow an order, and keep it simple to understand.
I half agree.
I build apps with Claude Code, and I test them by having the AI click through the UI with Playwright. That's enough to check that things work as specified and nothing is broken.
But I think the purpose is different when an AI tries it and when a person tries it. To put it in extreme terms, AI is for UI and people are for UX. People find UI problems too, though: in my music player, songs got blocked from playing in Safari on a real iPad, and I only found it by using it myself. The things found in this article, like the jokes that didn't land or not knowing what the tool even does, are on the side only people can find.
(I wrote this in Japanese and used AI to translate it.)
Does the author aware the blog is unreadable on Firefox mobile? I might have something wrong on my phone too, but I don't have an issue with anything else.. https://imgur.com/a/ctriVnD
You have pressed the "Drunk Mode" button on the theme switcher - probably on a previous visit.
Change the theme at the top and normality will be restored.
That's the "drunk" theme the site has. Scroll all the way to the right in the switcher, and select "reset".
Did you muck with the system fonts? On my Android FF it looks just fine, and yellow not black.
Yes. The amount of projects that don't just run is outstanding. Luckily docker container projects are inherently better at this is in terms of dependencies, but there are still often weird assumptions or medical incantations to get them during.
This is an underrated comment. If your project can run in Docker, providing a Dockerfile in addition to the README is incredibly valuable.
I've done this for internal dev tools! It's amazing how many assumptions you have about everything.
I've great success with friction logs: https://mikebifulco.com/posts/how-stripe-uses-friction-logs
If you are a platform team, going through this with your internal customers is both driving adoption and making your tools better. Highly recommended!
Hey - so cool to see someone else does this! Thanks for sharing my link, too. Glad you found it useful!
LLMs are also good for this; point them at your repo and ask them to do a fresh install and note all friction. One time when the lack of context really helps.
Not related to a README, but very much related to how programmers / creators speak (by which I mean type).
My way in to WordPress support back in 2004 was decoding answers to others from Photomatt and others.
A user would ask a question about WordPress and, for example, Photomatt would answer. His answer was always correct. Technically correct. But it didn't land for the question asker. They would reply with .. 'What?'
I would then replay with "What Matt has said is right, and this is what he means, this is the answer"
I gave them the information they needed in words they could understand.
It was not Matt's fault, it was not the user's fault.
It was translating in a way.
Same thing happened to me. The install command in my project's README was broken for one release. I didn't see it because it worked on my computer. I only found it when I tried on a new machine. Now we run that exact command automatically before every release.
Besides emojis, I find it too long. READMEs should be succinct and be like a switchboard to other docs (much like LLMS.txt tries to be for agents).
Also, it features an FAQ. FAQs are problematic (as in not often effective): https://passo.uno/what-the-faq/
Edit: Clarification
The link says "My opinion is that FAQs pose a problem only when there’s no strategy around their usage." Calling them "problematic" based on that seems like an exaggeration
"They were the ones who caught the mistakes that no spell chequer could."
Nice, good article lol. I appreciate a joke or two in a readme but totally understand the annoyance, I think forgetting to actually say what the software does is super common as well though. Often trying to figure out if something found on github will actually solve a problem only to be met with a list of install commands.
The 'look awesome project with funky name, here's how to install off you go' without a word to what one earth it actually does is amazingly common. Plenty of things posted here I bounce away from after hitting the linked page, finding something someone is obviously very proud of, but not having a clue what it's actually about :p
What I love bout this is how closely it hews to the principles of design research. Same principles, applied deeper in the experience as LLMs make things more accessible than no code, or CMS before that.
All people creating, need to speak to other people. Loved reading this.
Almost sounds like having a QA team is a good thing!
This used to be standard onboarding practice everywhere I’ve worked.
Point new starter at the readme and get them to fix any issues (hopefully very few!).
This is one of those things LLMs are really good at.
Create a new container or sandbox, copy in the git repo or point it at your staging docs, and see what happens.
LLMs are good at reading READMEs. They are absolutely horrendous at writing them.
I'm so old that I remember when a software deliverable included documentation, and the product delivery was incomplete without documentation.
Understandability depends on the audience.
E.g. as someone who doesn't "Fediverse", the intro section leaves me having no idea what an ActivityBot is or what an ActivityBot account is.
Also - formalize what can be. There may be e.g. opportunities to write scripts that can be tested and linted. I realize this isn't always possible, but I do think it should be ruled out rather than ignored.
> I hadn't actually explained what the software would do.
This is my #1 annoyance when looking at a trending repo
Excellent article! Thank you for the reminder that I need to be spending more time with users… or hirelings :)
>My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.
You didn't have to murder me like that!
Coolest thing I've read in months.
> My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.
:’)
I think the problem is that this doesn't simulate for people who can't or won't read the manual
Software X has a feature.
Me: "hi support, feature is not available??"
Support: "it doesn't work in that situation. Here's a link to our documentation with two dozen bullet points about where and when that feature doesn't work".
It's as if you selected a cell in Excel, and the copy-paste buttons were missing, and you raised a support case with Microsoft and they said "copy-paste does not work if your spreadsheet was opened from a NAS share. It's documented here that it doesn't work: <link>".
That is documentation as a defense, instead of the company putting in the effort to make the thing work, they put in documentation that it doesn't work so they can blame the user who "won't read the documentation".
Actually, that's a good point. I often run into issues that would have been solved by more careful reading.
Paying people to record themselves using your software without reading the instructions might actually be very informative.
I imagine the ideal is a product that requires no manual. That's not always doable, but sometimes it is. Sometimes you can get very close!
So usability testing?
Does anyone still write README files by hand now?
Somewhat related question: what is it about READMEs that AI agents love to dump the most useless, hard to contextualise & comprehend, irrelevant rubbish into them that makes understanding a project and onboarding so hard?
It feels like like the AI agents can't help themselves sometimes, and the judgement exercised around what's included and omitted is baffling.
But maybe READMEs have always been this bad, and AI agents have raised the baseline?
That sounds pretty similar to what I get from LLMs regardless of what they're writing for. Any time I get more than a paragraph out from an LLM, it tends to have of a lot of irrelevant details or unnecessary hedging, and I have to either wade through it to find the actual answer or try to convince it to make it more direct.
As someone on the spectrum, this does happen to me with people sometimes too; I struggle when asking a question and getting an answer that doesn't fit the "shape" of what I expect (e.g. asking a yes or no question and getting a relatively long sentence in response that doesn't contain either "yes" or "no" in it, which means I need to do the equivalent of applying it as a diff to my mental model and seeing if there are conflicts). This happens less frequently with other humans though, and on average the amount of effort I need try to figure out what they're saying is a lot lower. This doesn't make it less frustrating when I get that kind of output from an LLM, but it doesn't surprise me all that much that it happens.
I'm sure I do this all the time to people too, though. One of the biggest lessons I've learned in the past several years is that I communicate in ways that I'd probably have trouble understanding in reverse a lot more frequently than I realized, even I still do the things I find confusing from others less often than most people I interact with. I'm sure a lot of people might find this comment to be pretty much exactly like what I'm complaining about even though I feel fairly confident at least in this moment that my point is clear.
I hate READMEs with a gazillion emojis, too much noise.
Cannot agree more. Looks kinda childish too.
It was nice when emoji were used sparingly and with purpose and intention.
As my childhood English teacher said - too much of anything, good for nothing.
Immediate reaction - LLM generated. Hard to imagine a real human picking emojis to match feature description for a long list.
Indeed, these make me back out of a project immediately if I don’t have a strong need to use it, and it takes extra cognitive effort to ignore the emojis and focus on the actually meaningful text.
That's interesting. In my testing, about half the participants liked them, one didn't, and the rest didn't express a strong preference.
I kept them because they make me smile.
To me an emoji-filled README is a good sign both the README and the project were generated by an LLM.
I needed to read your sentence a few times to figure out you don't hate README files. I too dislike emojis overuse in README files.
And did it work?
Probably not, because almost no one reads the readme file unless there is a installation problem. =3
"I took notes by hand (fuck feeding the machine)"
Closed. You are on a machine right now as am I, lets not pretend we don't like them for clout.
I tried reading after that line but I couldn't take it seriously anymore.
Now we have new ways to solve this problem: send Haiku or Luna to do task using computer use, but without access to code. If it can't complete it, or takes too long, docs are bad.
Given the agents.md I’m assuming the readme was just spit out by an LLM and the goal was to not read as LLM text. Problem is, it reads like you prompted it to be written in more simple language.
I just find it a bit misleading that you’re saying you want to talk to real people all while trying to clean up AI slop.
I've made my AI policy very clear at https://gitlab.com/edent/activity-bot/#what-is-your-ai-polic...
None of the code or documentation was written by or assisted by AI.
> My jokes aren't funny and are actively confusing.
Confession time.
I used to be prone to giving things slightly silly names, particularly unrecoverable structured exceptions. Examples include PancakeLandingException, ReallyBadException, CataclysmicException, ApocalypticDeathException, and the like.
And then years and years ago I used to work for a company called Redgate and I started a tradition of slightly silly messages when early access builds of our .NET products would expire, all based on Monty Python sketches and quotes. So, obviously, the dead parrot sketch featured in there.
So far, so harmless, but this did come to a head somewhat spectacularly and in a couple of different ways.
Firstly, in 2009 one of my colleagues used a modified quote from The Life of Brian as an expiry message on a build. Somebody who appeared to be some sort of religious zealot complained loudly to the company. We were both in LA at the time, with a couple of other colleagues, attending build 2009, so we woke up to a chain of something like 50 panicked emails in our inboxes with people expressing differing levels of outrage and/or amusement whilst discussing various grovelling apology options... until someone figured out that it was actually an elaborate troll that we'd swallowed hook, line, and sinker. I can't remember the name of the person who caught us out but, hats off, well played, sir, well played. It did unfortunately mean we became a bit more cautious and business-like with our early access build expiry messages.
Secondly, and this one needs a bit of context setting... I've always been a fan of descriptive and explicit error messages: there should be enough information in any error message that most of the time the user can figure out what's wrong and fix their own problem OR at least so that if they get in touch with support, then support can quickly figure out the problem and get back to them with a solution. I'm not a fan of unhelpful, information poor, obfuscatory, or cryptic error messages.
But when I wanted to cause an application to exit because there'd been an error related to tampering with our licensing code I played somewhat against type. I wanted error messages that would uniquely identify what had happened, making it easy for us to figure out, whilst giving the user no clue (because I wanted to make it very slightly harder for hackers/crackers - but let's be real: this would never have actually stopped anyone). So I used successive lines of dialogue from a scene in House where House is trying to guess who Wilson's girlfriend is. I have no clear recollection of why I chose this dialogue to reproduce, but... I did.
Anyway, this did lead to some slightly confused support requests coming in from users mostly trying to use the tools legitimately in slightly unusual scenarios, but nothing that was overly burdensome. That was until early 2011, when Greg Young - he of event sourcing fame - posted the following gist because he'd encountered an error that said, "Because I wanna ask you about your girlfriend. I must know who she is, or you would've told me her name.": https://gist.github.com/gregoryyoung/871736.
Not at all creepy, right? And, of course, it went viral on twitter. Cue another massive email thread although, this time round, people just thought it was funny. However, we did decide to make the error messages a bit more boring and, in the end, I just gave them numbers.
Mostly I'm just glad the error Greg got wasn't the final line of dialogue in the exchange between House and Wilson: "Yo mamma." That would have been bad.
The 'fake error messages to thwart crackers' thing is pretty relatable - I think back in my day I went with 'early-exit trap (#23)' or the likes for this type of error condition. It does help that we didn't have any phone support - numbers would potentially be painful that way! Another common one I see is dictionary words though even something neutral like 'anteater' or 'weasel' or 'high-jig-south' can both be frustrating to see as a user as well as when trying to deal with support for the inevitable case an integrity check fails on real systems...
In general, software is still Beta if a program requires a readme file to install and use.
It is under 5 minutes to write a shell/bat/make/cmake script for each platform to configure library requirements, import OS specific data, and enable GPU/NPU features. Then run through the application build, installation package with stripped performance build, and or a few regression tests.
Lets say you have 4k downloads a month on a small project, and it takes 1 hour for each admin to read/configure. You just saved about 5 years of your users lives reading your document. =3
Many devs love to shit on the guy from the 'I just want the exe. Why is there no exe'? meme. On some level I get it. And in some cases it's not even reasonable to provide a single binary or whatever. But on the other hand, github is being used to deliver end-user software. It is no longer just a dev's workspace/playground. That and the amount of makefiles and python scripts I've seen fail due to some dependency nonsense fills me with rage. It's never Just™ typing 'make' unless the code is trivial. I can wade through the bullshit. I shouldn't have to, and many others aren't even able to.
>But it is really hard to ignore your own biases. Of course you know that certain commands require sudo and obviously when you wrote -foo you meant --foo and everyone knows that you have to reboot afterwards.
For God's sake, this is not "biases," wtf?? That's straight up just not reading/following the document you're supposed to be testing/reviewing. When I test my documents I actually follow them exactly, step by step, and I always catch these sorts of mistakes. Always. I always copy/paste commands because I know that is what the customer will do, so I have to make sure that works flawlessly.
Dude, if you actually follow your own document, you don't have to pay people to do it for you. Also, you can make sure the person you are paying doesn't ignore the document like you apparently do.
I stopped reading, I'm not interested in whatever else this dude has to say. I'm literally flabbergasted.
Maybe it's because my documents have always gone to real paying customers who have to get through this install, and not some hobby project I'm super proud of or whatever and I don't think I'm super clever? Idk.
Writing good documentation is difficult. From those who say "the source code explains everything", I think 80% are too lazy to write documentation in the first place.
Having said that, I found consistently that when a project has working examples, ideally documented a bit, aka explained, they tend to work much better than those projects that have no examples. Working examples often also help get into a project quickly and check out how it works. It helps to learn too.
READMEs are not useless, of course, but the quality varies a lot. I also know of folks who use AI slop spam to improve it, but while it may improve a little bit, it generates a lot of horribly to read text that makes no sense. I am noticing this with the ruby core dev team - they (almost) all suddenly have perfect language skills but it is more like an advanced babelfish translator. What they piece together here makes no sense. Claude in particular is now famous for this slop content. And I don't understand what it is used: real people read any of this AI slop? Because I just skip it or filter it away these days.
>From those who say "the source code explains everything"
Because theoretically you should be able to describe not only your entire application logic, but upper and lower bounds of inputs as well. Good code would describe this inherently.
Documentation is only useful when a) the application is not source available, so you have no choice, b) you want to save a human developer time for them to understand your code, or c) you want to use documentation as a cache hit for agent use (less token spend)
> I know someone is going to say "why not just ask an LLM to simulate a range of users?" The answer is very simple - I want to speak to real people. People are brilliant! They can make you laugh, you can see their cat when it wanders on to the call, they bring a unique perspective to the problem, and they're really happy when you give them a €25 voucher. Some will gladly do it for free and make you happy!
So what the author actually paid for was to interact with humans and the README checking was secondary - because, really, my own first thought was literally to ask an LLM check and try to follow the instructions in the README and pretty much any decent LLM (including several local ones) would be able to check if they're adequate and even suggest improvements (just don't let them write it for you :-P).
Agents and people catch different things. My agent reviewers find real bugs, like pinch-zoom breaking while a finger is on the joystick. But none of them said "this is boring". I did, on my phone, when I walked my character up to a house and nothing happened.
Nix.
I know, I know: It's complicated. But have you heard of AI agents?
But I just onboarded 4 interns on a project where all they had to do was
Our project manager requested information that was available in the issue tracker. I told her, she could get all her answers by asking our agent, and it'd automatically reference the issue tracker. I figured I'd just need to show her how to install the Nix package manager. But no, she already had it because another project by another team depended on it.Putting wrong information is README is so outdated when you have programmatic setup of your entire toolchain.