4 ms·
Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs
- Brajeshwar 6mo agoIsn’t that the first one reads, when one wants to Setup? What changed?
- loloquwowndueo 6mo agoThe first one i read is README
- regus 6mo 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.
- loloquwowndueo 6mo agoIt feels ai-written, for sure. The sentence structure and idioms are very typical of ai writing these days.
- cryzinger 6mo agoAgreed; 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."
- dijksterhuis 6mo agoi'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.
- Forge36 6mo agoOn 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"
- Eisenstein 6mo agoSo, how do your users uninstall it when they don't want it any more?
- Titled86 6mo agolol too true, learned this the hard way
- quangtrn 6mo ago[flagged]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- axus 6mo agoI'm going to ask a lazy question, don't you need a good setup document in order to write the installer that executes setup?
- finthehuman 6mo agoClaude reads them.
- assimpleaspossi 6mo 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 6mo agoThat's a no from me.
- flexagoon 6mo agoIf 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.
- buescher 6mo agoJust have an AI make a video out of it, I guess.
- fc417fc802 6mo agoReplace the manpage with a tiktok clone. Every video clip is a different section of the manpage. /s
- shlewis 6mo agoOkay I'm building this.
- bigstrat2003 6mo agoGatekeeping 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.
- NamlchakKhandro 6mo agoWhy do people keep creating MCP servers. All you need is bash
- rurban 6mo agoRegarding 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.