Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs

(hanzilla.co)

26 points | by donutshop 5 days ago ago

22 comments

  • assimpleaspossi 2 days ago ago

    >The wizard opens your browser to sign in, scans your machine for installed agents, and writes the config to each one. It supports over 30 agents. The user never sees a config file.

    In this day and age, I find it interesting that no one is screaming about security and privacy concerns about this which is so prevalent on any social media platform including this one.

    • qmr a day ago ago

      That's a no from me.

  • regus 2 days ago ago

    “ And I realized my setup instructions weren’t documentation. They were a wall between my product and the people who wanted to use it.”

    Assuming this was written by a human, I think it is time to retire saying “this is not x it is y”.

    The moment I see that I think the text is AI generated and I lose interest.

    • dijksterhuis 2 days ago ago

      i've noticed recently i actually do that fairly often. so i'm consciously trying to edit after the fact to remove it for that exact reason.

      is annoying.

    • loloquwowndueo 2 days ago ago

      It feels ai-written, for sure. The sentence structure and idioms are very typical of ai writing these days.

      • cryzinger 2 days ago ago

        Agreed; I don't think "Not X, but Y" is a reliable tell on its own, but taken as a whole TFA set off my AI writing spidey-sense big time. The intro takes three paragraphs of fluff (ironically) to say "My product used to have long docs, but after using a product with much shorter docs it made me reconsider my approach."

  • Forge36 2 days ago ago

    On a recent project we joked "developers can't read". Occasionally we'd ask for help and be pointed to the docs "I can't read".

    I suspect there's two big parts to this:

    1. Users expect batteries included and that everything "just works" the first time.

    2. The language you used differs match your audience. E.g they search "gray" and find no results, however you've spelt it "grey"

  • axus 2 days ago ago

    I'm going to ask a lazy question, don't you need a good setup document in order to write the installer that executes setup?

  • rurban a day ago ago

    Regarding skills: just symlink them. Since opencode and codex share .agents/skills use that for the others also. Just the hooks and mcp integrations are still proprietary. codex needs a config.toml setting, but then you can use eg safe-chains everywhere.

    Regarding setup docs: Put it into an .deb and .rpm, put them on a free webserver, and no need to check for updates or setups.

  • Brajeshwar 5 days ago ago

    Isn’t that the first one reads, when one wants to Setup? What changed?

  • Eisenstein 2 days ago ago

    So, how do your users uninstall it when they don't want it any more?

  • flexagoon 2 days ago ago

    If a "developer" can't manage to read one paragraph in a readme, maybe the "developer tool" is not for them. As much as I usually hate gatekeeping, basic reading comprehension is a skill I'd happily gatekeep at.

    • bigstrat2003 2 days ago ago

      Gatekeeping is much maligned (and not without reason), but I think that the results of no gatekeeping have proven far worse than the gatekeeping ever was. Sometimes, if someone can't put the effort into something, they should be shut out.

    • buescher 2 days ago ago

      Just have an AI make a video out of it, I guess.

      • fc417fc802 2 days ago ago

        Replace the manpage with a tiktok clone. Every video clip is a different section of the manpage. /s

        • shlewis 2 days ago ago

          Okay I'm building this.

  • finthehuman 2 days ago ago

    Claude reads them.

  • NamlchakKhandro 2 days ago ago

    Why do people keep creating MCP servers.

    All you need is bash

  • quangtrn 2 days ago ago

    [flagged]

  • Titled86 2 days ago ago

    lol too true, learned this the hard way