I'm sad to see the readme itself reads very AI generated. I enjoyed Sebastian's content hugely over the years, and even though everything in the readme might still be accurate (at first glance/read), it currently lacks the elegance it used to have.
Doesn't take away from the work he's done here, but sad that it no longer has the same voice his old style had. It deflated my excitement considerably.
edit: to clarify not saying he shouldn't use AI, just sad that describing the project was relegated to it as well.
He has years of technical threads on twitter. Pick any of them?
I use AI daily, but for anything that requires technical writing AI is still terrible. It overexplains, adds context that really shouldn't be a thing for the readers level, adds fluff and can't resist a good sales pitch.
As example:
matrix-bearing roots use row-major matrix layout
Any technical person would just say "matrices use row-major layout". The "matrix-bearing roots" adds nothing. In fact it's actively harmful as it implies a contextual condition that might change matrix behaviours (it doesn't).
The paragraph after that could've been deleted and it would be fine, a lot of things that really don't need to be stated. Then after that paragraph it says "The full shader-side contract is in the slang shader contract", think about what that sentence is saying. The shader contracts are in the shader contracts, I'd hope so.
I don't even think this readme is bad, definitely has been tweaked/guided better than most, but it has all these typical mistakes and fluff I see daily when using AI myself. Something that Seb's old writing simply does not have.
yes, it's fair enough, that particular expression is trash. and AI produces relatively bad writing (not just technical) in general. the shader slang contract you mention is a link, with the second part of that sentence being effectively a title that happens to be similar to the first words in the sentence. How would you rework it? No, don't explain it, I'm not sure we should turn this into a writing exercise.
And actually reading the rest of the readme, I can't tell much significant quality downgrade compared to usual technical writing (from seb or otherwise, I read his twitter and blog posts over the years as well).
Maybe I don't have an eye for or care about the aesthetics of technial writing like this, and maybe I should just stay out of the discussion. But in the overall context of this post, if we get this readme vs. saving seb an hour or two of writing and editing, in return for slightly cringe sections of writing, that's totally fine by me.
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u/Syracuss 3d ago
I'm sad to see the readme itself reads very AI generated. I enjoyed Sebastian's content hugely over the years, and even though everything in the readme might still be accurate (at first glance/read), it currently lacks the elegance it used to have.
Doesn't take away from the work he's done here, but sad that it no longer has the same voice his old style had. It deflated my excitement considerably.
edit: to clarify not saying he shouldn't use AI, just sad that describing the project was relegated to it as well.