Your points make sense and they're on The Checklist, thanks! I probably won't sweat CI/CD integration for the demo yet but ship (as the other commenter mentionned, also thanks!) something readable, mostly testable and usable (but limited) on day 0 and go from there.
I do wonder what a recruiter looks for in a good README though. Technical chops or perspective on potential applications/intended project direction or ... ?
You don't have to go whole-hog on CI or anything, but GitHub Actions is pretty easy to just knock together a thing that runs `make test` or equivalent.
I've ended up building boilerplate workflows for various languages, environments, etc. to just drop in and tweak per-project.
I do wonder what a recruiter looks for in a good README though. Technical chops or perspective on potential applications/intended project direction or ... ?