alt Hacker NewsWhat frustrates me about many projects is it's never been easier to just make a quick video or image or gif and put it in the README to show what the value is. This was at least somewhat complex before AI but now you can just paste an image and have the AI put it in your README.
I guess the frustrating bit is that the readme is 100s of lines long. AI is already saving you so much time on a project like this but you still make me clone and spin it up if i want to see it for real.
I get that open source is a gift and you’re not obliged to do anything I say but please consider taking the extra few minutes on your next project.
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To that end, I've found it super easy to tell $LLM to make me a video showcasing the main features of whatever I'm building, have it write subtitles and give it a voice over. Obviously for a README a simple gif with burned in subtitles/annotations would be more useful.
Especially if the project is web-based it can just spin up playwright and record its actions.
Wow, I just can't agree with this take at all. The README is only 161 lines (very short for a git repo README!) and took me about 15 seconds to skim and decide whether or not it was interesting enough to keep the tab open.
Most of the project pages I have seen with videos either animate things at hyper-speed, meaning you can't actually follow is what happening, or drag on for minutes just to communicate something that I could have read in seconds. My time is more valuable than that.
Images are cool, however. We should do more of those.