Yeah, I've started dialing back my use of AI for READMEs because of this.

My previous rule was that I never use AI for writing that expresses my own opinions or tries to be convincing (anything on my blog for example) but I'll let it do technical documentation.

The top of a README is about convincing and explaining why I built something though, which means it should fit my no-AI policy after all.

The AI language really stands out, too. "What is automatic and what depends on the agent". A human might write, "jevmen watches your coding session with Claude Code or Codex and picks just the right moment to remember important things that you decided along the way. There are some differences in how jevmem works, depending on which coding harness you are using. The table below summarizes these differences:"

I don't know why the models were generally trained to be so brief, but it's definitely not the way anyone I know actually writes. A second pass is always a good idea to clean this stuff up. And, thankfully, the models are all pretty good at that.

My pet theory is that while the pretraining -> RL pipeline achieves very impressive results, it does not reward clarity of thought or elegance. It's not obvious whether it even should for most tasks, but it does grind on me as a human who needs elegance in order to keep everything under control. You give astra/codex many tasks, it retires them all more efficiently than I could by hand. But you look under the hood and every bugfix is another codepath, it just hammers away at things with admirable persistence and vigor until the tests pass. Similarly in discussions and docs, I've noticed many LLMs like to "beat around the bush."

I once told the agent explicitly not to write like it's trying to impersonate Hemingway and it started writing like a normal human being. It's surprising how a writing style that was once revolutionary is now a hallmark of sloppyness.

Maybe give it a try next time you write a readme with agents. That and giving it an example of good README in real world repos can increase dramatically the likelihood of synthesizing a serviceable README.

AI readme should be a starting point. I typically remove at least 50% of the details (without any particular skill use, it goes into extremes like "x clears the edit" and writes a related wall of text in the middle of the important explanation).

It's such a Claudism.

Everything is inundated with info about other things tried.

Comments and docs flooded with things found out in the process when you want something about the info you need to know now.

I've recently started trying out a little approach that half makes me cringe as I think of gastown, but sharing FWIW

- All decisions get logged to DECISIONS.md, sequentially

- Before writing a decision, read through past decisions to see if any conflicts

- If no conflicts, encode the decision into the CODE.md

- If any conflicts, ask a Tribunal of 3 agents to find a resolution—each of them should be prompted in slightly different ways

I've only done this for one pretty big project but so far it seems to be working well

Keeping history and using history are two different things though

You may want the old decision in the audit trail so you know why something changed without putting that old decision back into the model context every time

I think memory systems need a pretty strict separation between active memory and historical memory

From reading the readme, it looks like superseded decisions are not added to context.

> Next session, the relevant lines are added to Claude's context.

At least that's how I interpret it? If it is adding superseded decisions, that does seem bad.

Is it outdated? Its an avenue already visited, tried and abandoned, so valuable info regarding architectural decisions.

TypeSafe AI are the providers for Jev. This complaint is like saying it’s a red flag that Claude Code sends lots of information to somewhere called Anthropic.

The people that run local jev like models do sth similar. Train a seperate nn adapter on top of qwen 4b so it has balanced probabilities whatever that means and apparently it works quite well.

Side note: conspiracy theorists say that jev is a qwen model fine tuned but who know if true