On README-driven development

Tom Preston-Werner's article on README-driven development has aged well in the era of LLMs. AI tools offer powerful automations, but still require quite a bit of steering to produce an acceptable result. Documents like README provide a some guardrails for all contributors of a project, human or otherwise. The first thing I do when bootstrapping a new project is write the following files, in this order: README.md: the project goal, a usage example (especially so if the project is a library), license info, links to other documents. README is a high-level overview of the project and an index for further information. ARCHITECTURE.md: the technical details. The chosen stack, libraries of particular importance, a high-level code map, and upfront design decisions or constraints. See this classic post for more detail. CONTRIBUTING.md: project setup, prerequisite dependencies, and how to actually run the thing locally. I like to keep this out of the README to avoid bloating it with technical…