I think the issue is, you used to be able to tell at a glance how much effort someone put into a project (among other things) and that would give you a reasonable approximation of what to expect from the project itself.

But now the signals are much harder to read. People post polished looking libraries / tools with boastful convincing claims about what they can do for you, yet they didn't even bother to check if they work at all, just wasting everyone's time.

It's a weird new world.

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another_twist 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

I think you should never do that. Who cares how much effort went into something ? Its the result that matters.

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jasonjmcghee 3 days ago | parent [-]

Maybe "care" would have been more appropriate than "effort".

	▲	another_twist 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Not even "care". The result is the only thing that matters. If at a first glance the source code of a project doesnt look pretty or whatnot odds might be that the reader landed on particularly nasty chunk or that it was indeed as complicated as the code itself. In my view this test is better done after the overall functionality of the software has been proven. Honestly if libraries with fancy benchmarks don't solve the business problem, I won't care much how clean their code is or if its written in Rust.

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tough 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It's fake polish, but at the end of the day you have always to check whats in the codebase if you're gonna vendor it in or adopt it as a dep imho

if anything the smelly readme's that look all like claude wrote them, are a good tell to check deeper