README, not

(Thanks to Facundo Tuesca for the name inspiration). If you’re like me, you spend a lot of your working day (and a good chunk of your personal time) reading code online. Increasingly, that means accidentally reading a lot of “slop”1. Personally, slop isn’t annoying per se2: it’s okay for personal software3, for example, to be slop. What makes slop annoying is the feeling of being bait-and-switched: much like the written word, I want to be informed4 before I spend my human attention on machine outputs. I’m a big believer in giving people a way to express honest intentions. For example, I do sometimes want to drop some slop on the Internet (to save for myself later, or for others to reuse without reading), but I don’t want to mislead people about the intent or effort behind it. So: what if we gave people a way to express their honest intentions with slop? We use README files to tell users where to start when reading a project; I think we should have a READMENOT5 file that users (or…