It has a utility in the same way that raw ingredients have a utility in a kitchen. The chef doesn’t just drop a messy pile of uncooked meat and vegetables onto your plate and tell you to figure it out. That’s exactly what people are doing when they vomit out a bunch of impenetrable slop and expect the reader to do the hard work of comprehending it on their behalf.

You can’t expect others to care about what you’re saying if you’ve not spent a moment considering how best to say it. The reader’s time is no less valuable than your own. If you think composing a readme for your project is worth zero minutes of your time, that’s the appropriate amount of time for readers to allocate to it.

For whatever it’s worth, I also cancelled my Claude subscription recently and shifted back to OpenAI solely because I find its outputs far more readable. I’ll even accept a slight hit on model performance as a trade-off. If I’m unwilling to read Claude-speak when I’m being paid an hourly rate, you can be sure I’m not reading it for free.