Comment by munksbeer
1 day ago
Can I please congratulate you on your README. It rapidly tells me what I'm looking at, and why I might be interested in the project. There are so many READMEs around that ... just don't do that. They ramble about technical implementation details, how their language choice is amazing, and a third of the way through the README, I'm still left wondering, "but what does this project do?".
I find it to be confusing LLM spam. It spends a lot of time talking about Qt APIs, and dearimgui... most of which could go in a separate page.
But the worst part is all code snippets are followed by an image which is not related to the code snippet. It's not what you get by typing the code... it's something completely different.
Did you skip Part I?
Many of my old >1K star GitHub projects were not that great, but I always made sure to create the cleanest, simplest possible READMEs, inspired by things like the Python requests library's docs (https://github.com/psf/requests). I think it helped a lot in their success.
I remember someone once created a GitHub issue requesting I turn the README into some verbose technical thing with full API docs and a bunch of people replied saying they greatly preferred the "pitch + high-level examples" style.
Would be good if you could write the README without an LLM
Yes, this is so important and yet so often not considered. This README was pretty good, thorough and not ambiguous. The number of projects that assume you know what their obscure idea relates to is huge, mainly as the authors can't put themselves in the shoes of their audience.
Yes, this is definitely one of my pet peeves. Just give me input --> output, then everything in between.
...really? for my part, after a few paragraphs i felt in my bones that i was reading undisclosed llm output and noped out of evaluating the entire thing any further.
but also the fact that yours is the most upvoted comment tells me there are entire swathes of people for whom that style works, and i am interested to get in people's heads about that, because it might yield some insight re: for what kind of audience these labs are optimising the style of text these models generate. so, if someone is reading this comment, and you broadly agree with the comment i am replying to, please answer these questions:
1. is english your native language?
2. what about the prose do you find appealing?
3. do you not find the structure (colossal wall of text, infodumping about largely irrelevant details) annoying/noisy?
4. does the word-to-word style and clichéd phrasing not immediately set off your llm alarm bells?
i guess people can answer if they disagree too, if they really want to
I liked the README, or what I read of it.
1. English is my native language.
2. The organization was to the point (eg it described what this is and who would use it up front). I can't say I found the prose "appealing" -- about the best I can say is that it was so obviously LLM writing that it implicitly told me that this is most likely a large mostly unattended porting project, which helped me set my expectations accordingly. Note that this is also why I stopped after getting a good feel for what it all is; the project would be interesting if I had a need to make something with that exact style of UI, but otherwise there wasn't going to be some shiny new idea or brilliant perspective that I could apply more widely.
3. Partly. It was a wall, but not that impenetrable a wall. There's plenty worse, and it was broken up enough for me to get through. Things were signposted well enough for me to skip a lot of what wasn't relevant to me.
4. Oh, absolutely. See above.
I'm finally growing the ability to extract value even after detecting that text is in the en-SLOP locale. Originally I couldn't detect it, then I could and couldn't tolerate it, now I'm starting to be able to treat it like broken English or caveman speak. I have to work to extract value, albeit a different type of work than those two.
It's mostly about suppressing my reactivity to the choppy phrasing and braggadocio (which are both the results of reinforcement training to elicit exactly the sort of reaction that I'm suppressing).
I could tell within a few sentences that it was naked slop, and I was grateful to be able to nope out rapidly, without missing anything.
It still sounds like LLM which is nauseating to read. For instance: "Blender's interface is famous for how it feels. You press a number field and drag: the cursor vanishes, the value glides under your hand, and you never hit the edge of the screen. " that's ChatGPT writing.
It is ALL AI generated I can say that because I recently worked on a landing page and wrestled with Claude Opus the WHOLE way through. Claude has no idea how to write copy. Neither do any of the others, you have to edit with a fine-toothed comb.
To the project maintainer: don’t ask people to read a terrible AI generated sales pitch novella that quantifies your AI generated port against every UI framework out there.
Here’s the obvious giveaways:
“ 4. The many ways in” “ Python, four ways”
“ tkinter: all 7,846 public names of tkinter and ttk. Nine real programs behave identically on the standard library and on BUI.”
“ Rust: the web platform, natively”
Ugh it’s excruciating. You’re better off with a readme that shows a few screenshots and installation instructions.
It also says it's all LLM explicitly near the bottom in the FAQ
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i am way too lazy to write good documentation. BUt i also dont want to have anyone read claudette-prose so i noticed that
"down to earth" and "hobby-project" does a good job. its still not perfect but better than the vanilla output. eg. https://github.com/busssard/OpenRing
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This is why I stopped using Claude. ChatGPT is better in that regards, but you still have to write a ton of rules for it to read half-decent and then edit it manually anyway.
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it's funny how these claudese constructions also come out of lil baby local qwens and stuff too. i guess they're just directly distilling a claude endpoint, or whatever.
like, if people are gonna be turning the crank to generate prose-like text from statistical models and calling it a day, aren't "subagents" a hip new thing nowadays? there do exist models that aren't overcooked to impressively bad long-tail in the pursuit of maximum coding benchmark scores. such other models generate prose-like text that is significantly less miserable to wade through.
if you're a vibecoder who's terminally committed to the bit, for god's sake, at least tell a local gemma to draft your readme or something. an occasional outright falsehood is less damaging to usability than the experience of reading feeling like trudging through a pool filled with treacle. (mind, both are a violation of trust, and a failure to deliver proof of work, and please stop, but at least if the falsehoods are comprehensible and identifiable there's light at the end of the tunnel)
Thanks for the word nausea - I've been trying to put my finger on that - I kept thinking of sickness but that's too much, LLM nausea is definitely a thing.
Edit: I found reading those examples in the most sanctimonious voice I could imagine seemed very plausible - maybe LLMs sound like they are up their own arse.
Not to mention that it includes screengrabs! Which a shocking amount of gui and web projects dont do
I can't figure out if you're being sarcastic
The very first line of their README:
"Blender's user interface, as a library you can use from Python, Rust, JavaScript (React, Svelte), C, C++ and Dear ImGui."
This tells me a huge amount of what I need to know, if I'm interested in this project or not.
Compare it to another very recent example posted on hn: https://github.com/rivet-dev/rivet - You need to get some way down the page until it discloses what you might be able to do with the project. https://github.com/rivet-dev/rivet#use-cases
But by that stage, even though it isn't very far down the page, I'm already checked out.
thank you, I thought you didn't like it lol. let me know if you use it.
We also have a discord server, lmk if you're planning on using BUI!
isn't dear imgui a gui library already?
It's not a complete sentence, is that a positive thing?
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I don't get this comment, the readme felt like slop to me. What makes this any better.. I genuinely want to understand why someone thinks this is a good readme sure I may have seen worse but I have seen much better readmes.
The very first line of their README: "Blender's user interface, as a library you can use from Python, Rust, JavaScript (React, Svelte), C, C++ and Dear ImGui."
Then, the README very quickly continues with "What BUI is" and "Why BUI exists". These are all the exact things I want to know, ASAP, when I encounter a new project. The language reads perfectly fine to me.
Here is another example of a nice README: https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv
Do you know what I don't want to know first? What the startup time is, what language you wrote it in (because you think it makes your project cooler), some other random internal details about the performance of the thing, when I don't even yet know what the thing is.
> what language you wrote it in
You mean something like:
> turns it into a standalone UI library with a small C core
...?
Or this:
> At the heart of BUI is the kit: a small runtime written in C
......??
I personally have no issue of this, but the more I read your comments the more confused I got.
I'm confused. Are you being sarcastic? Isn't this readme in the most typical LLM-ism?
They are not being sarcastic. The first first sentence tells you what it is.
If that's an LLM-ism, then it's one that I hope spreads.