People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:11:53 GMT

kasperd@westergaard.social — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 10:11:53 GMT

I guess I am guilty of not writing sufficient documentation for some of the code I have written. But I have definitely taken the time to explain to new colleagues how it works. And I have also done many pair programming sessions with colleagues to improve the code. And they have now written documentation of the code for AI to read.

But the documentation they wrote actually looks good, so that can probably be helpful for new hires as well. We haven’t stopped hiring, we have hired a couple of new people this year.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:46:14 GMT

holdenweb@freeradical.zone — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:46:14 GMT

@rabbit @mmeier @frederic With (uninformed) vibe coding it’s worms all the way down.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:27:06 GMT

orange_lux@eldritch.cafe — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 08:27:06 GMT

@rabbit @mmeier @frederic I can confirm that.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Fri, 24 Apr 2026 07:27:29 GMT

jwalzer@infosec.exchange — Fri, 24 Apr 2026 07:27:29 GMT

@frederic

Yes, And people who celebrated the freedom of "just talking to the computer in human language" and "getting rid of formal programming languages" are now definiing specifications how a good AGENT.md or RULES.md or SKILLS.md has to be written ... to formalize the language to talk to the computers

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:41:34 GMT

julianoe@mastodon.xyz — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:41:34 GMT

@frederic often times it is not even a good documentation or README.md for humans still.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:41:32 GMT

jcolag@mastodon.social — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 21:41:32 GMT

@mmeier @frederic Yes! I accidentally read one of those agent-files in a project, and was ALMOST impressed by how comprehensive it all was (at least there) in terms of architecture, style, and even comment tone, because that's obviously useful. And then I realized that they'd probably scream if an actual prospective contributor read it for advice...

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:27:35 GMT

aslmx@chaos.social — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 20:27:35 GMT

@elduvelle @mmu_man @frederic

In recent years I had seen an increasing amount of "Open powershell and paste these commands" instructions on the internet.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:12:33 GMT

elduvelle@neuromatch.social — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:12:33 GMT

@mmu_man @frederic
to be fair the regedit editing happens about once per year in windows while command-line stuff happens about once every 3 days in Linux (or more)...

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:09:48 GMT

staticrocket@defcon.social — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:09:48 GMT

@frederic same people who refused to install a linter

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:03:24 GMT

wonka@chaos.social — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 19:03:24 GMT

"WebMCP"... Does anyone else think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_Control_Program_%28Tron%29 there, or is it just me?

@patrick_h_lauke @frederic

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:55:42 GMT

kirakira@furry.engineer — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 18:55:42 GMT

@frederic i can't believe this is what it took for people to write readable high level docs

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:10:18 GMT

mmeier@social.mei-home.net — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:10:18 GMT

@rabbit @frederic Oh yeah, that's another whole bag of weird I might just be too "left behind" to fully grasp.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:04:00 GMT

atax1a@infosec.exchange — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 17:04:00 GMT

@mmeier @frederic and then these people don't even actually write the documentation. they go "claude, document it" and the documentation is slop

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:57:48 GMT

mitsunee@mk.absturztau.be — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 16:57:48 GMT

@frederic@chaos.social and then there's a group of users who say they don't know markdown until you call it "discord formatting"

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:08:29 GMT

confuseacat@mastodon.social — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 15:08:29 GMT

@jhauge @frederic That's a very good point!
Why would someone who will never read anything bother to write something? Especially when they overgeneralise and cannot imagine that any other human would ever read anything.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:26:31 GMT

kayohtie@blimps.xyz — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 14:26:31 GMT

@mmeier @frederic I keep seeing this, and I can only imagine that like, half of it is generated anyway, and the rest is the "one more hit bro" effect of the dopamine feedback loop that generating output so rapidly causes, so they just keep adding more and more and more and then they're used to doing whatever to generate that feedback loop.

Couple with how real people don't give the same "you're absolutely right!"-style feedback and repeated exposure to doing this and it becomes their default. Unfortunately.

Welp, they keep vibe coding their shit and they'll keep ending up with music hosting servers that have a paid component but isn't shipped as a separate binary and requires a single line or 2 of code to be patched to enable for free.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:58:15 GMT

_ryekdarkener_@mastodon.social — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 13:58:15 GMT

@mmeier @frederic

Well … at least this documentation is also valuable for humans. And LLMs will have plenty of time to explain it to everyone, according to the asker’s level.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:02:59 GMT

mmu_man@m.g3l.org — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:02:59 GMT

@frederic reminds me of the "Oh no Linux is too complex you have to use the command line" crowd that at the same time dig entire forums to find the REGEDIT magic to make their games work on Windows…

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:01:36 GMT

perigee@rage.love — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 12:01:36 GMT

@mmeier @frederic @Binder it's a bitter pill. I think a significant difference is that random strangers being helped by documentation and mentoring are not as emotionally satisfying as helping machines that are engineered to be directly grateful and endlessly complimentary. Which I believe is an intentional, manipulative choice by LLM service providers to encourage loyalty beyond reason.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:29:11 GMT

svavar@masto.svavar.com — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:29:11 GMT

@mmeier @frederic

They're showing you who they are. They don't care about other people and the LLM is serving as unpaid slave labour that does their bidding without question.

This is a recurring theme with AI and it's going to get worse.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:26:47 GMT

jhauge@mastodon.green — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:26:47 GMT

@frederic seeing the same - as a person with a mild obsession over readme files I will say this - AI tooling is better at getting through reading of readmes than most devs I worked with.

If I had a dime for each time I've written "It's in the readme" or "This should be in the readme" in chats …

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:24:25 GMT

geraldew@fosstodon.org — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 11:24:25 GMT

@mmeier @frederic That's curious, because that aspect doesn't seem to bug me.

I'm the person who writes documentation of techniques I've derived and shares them with colleagues - none of whom ever seem to return the favour.

However, they will happily video chat about or screen-share what they've done, so it's not the sharing part that puts them off.

My guess is that commitment into stored text scares them, plus the risk of it being critiqued - and they know the LLM won't do that.

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:27:03 GMT

patrick_h_lauke@mastodon.social — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 10:27:03 GMT

@frederic also, developers who never gave a shit about #accessibility now bending over backwards to make their forms/controls "AI agent friendly" ... https://mastodon.social/@patrick_h_lauke/116453512115422196

Reply to People who previously wouldn't touch a README.md with a ten foot pole are now writing entire novels in Markdown for their AI tooling. on Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:17:12 GMT

mmeier@social.mei-home.net — Thu, 23 Apr 2026 09:17:12 GMT

@frederic Yes. People who couldn't be arsed to write a single word of documentation for their human colleagues suddenly don't have any issue at all with writing miles and miles of instructions for their AI colleagues.

Same for people who previously couldn't find time to mentor a student or new junior colleague because "it's too much work to describe the task in enough detail". For their LLM? No problem at all.
That's the one that really gets under my skin.