20

Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs

>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.

an hour agoassimpleaspossi

The framing shift that helps: instead of "how do I get users to read setup docs," ask "what would it take to have no setup docs at all." Usually ends up being a better product anyway.

2 hours agoquangtrn
[deleted]
2 hours 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.

3 hours agoregus

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.

an hour agodijksterhuis

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

3 hours agololoquwowndueo

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."

an hour agocryzinger

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"

3 hours agoForge36

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?

2 hours agoaxus

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.

43 minutes agoflexagoon

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

37 minutes agobuescher

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

25 minutes agofc417fc802

Why do people keep creating MCP servers.

All you need is bash

42 minutes agoNamlchakKhandro

Claude reads them.

an hour agofinthehuman

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

2 hours agoEisenstein

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

3 days agoBrajeshwar

The first one i read is README

3 hours agololoquwowndueo

lol too true, learned this the hard way