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?
Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs
11–20 of 23 posts
Re: Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs
#12“ 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.
It feels ai-written, for sure. The sentence structure and idioms are very typical of ai writing these days.
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."
Re: Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs
#13“ 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.
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.
Re: Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs
#14Claude reads them.
Re: Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs
#15>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.
Re: Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs
#16If 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.
Re: Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs
#17Why do people keep creating MCP servers.
All you need is bash
Re: Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs
#18If 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.
Just have an AI make a video out of it, I guess.
Re: Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs
#19If 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.
Just have an AI make a video out of it, I guess.
Replace the manpage with a tiktok clone. Every video clip is a different section of the manpage. /s
Re: Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs
#20If 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.
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.