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Dev Setup Wizard

automation
Year
2026
Used by
Non-technical people
  1. triggerA shared knowledge base pays off in proportion to how many people are in it, and getting in means a git client, an SSH key and an agent connection.
  2. transformationPut every exact command on one page in the order they are run, handle the platform someone is actually on, and make each one a single click to copy.
  3. outputOne self contained HTML file that takes a non technical person from nothing to a working repository and an agent that can read it.

metricPeople reached the repos who could not before. No count.

The knowledge base got better the more people were in it. Getting in meant a git client, a key pair, and a client connecting an agent to the vault. That is an ordinary morning for an engineer, and the people who needed the vault most were designers, researchers and product managers.

The obstacle is never running a command. It is not knowing which one, and not knowing whether it worked.

An installer that needs installing has already lost. Somebody who cannot clone a repository cannot run a setup script either. The only artifact with no prerequisites at all is a page you open in a browser, so that is what this is: one self contained file, no server, no dependency, nothing to install in order to start installing.

It cannot execute anything on your machine and it never pretends to. What it removes is every decision. Install the package manager, install the runtime, generate a key of the right type, start the agent, copy the public half of the key to your clipboard, install the vault client. Each command exact, in the order it is actually run, one click to copy, with the path for people not on a Mac handled rather than mentioned in a footnote.

It is a load bearing part of the knowledge base rather than polish on top of it, and it did the job: people ended up on the repositories who could not have got there on their own.

Screens

  1. Step thirteen of twenty two of the setup page. A sidebar down the left lists the finished steps with ticks. The panel shows how to install a package manager, with the exact command in a terminal block and a copy button beside it, then a green panel warning that the password prompt shows nothing at all as you type, that this is normal and not a bug.
    Step 13 of 22. The green panel is the point: it says the password field will show nothing at all while you type, because that is where somebody new to a terminal decides the thing is broken and stops.

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