Nobody Reads Your Setup Docs

(hanzilla.co)

20 points | by donutshop 3 days ago

11 comments

  • assimpleaspossi 51 minutes 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.

  • quangtrn 2 hours ago
    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.
  • regus 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.

    • dijksterhuis 1 hour 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 hours ago
      It feels ai-written, for sure. The sentence structure and idioms are very typical of ai writing these days.
      • cryzinger 1 hour 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 hours 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 1 hour 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?
  • flexagoon 40 minutes 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.
    • buescher 34 minutes ago
      Just have an AI make a video out of it, I guess.
      • fc417fc802 22 minutes ago
        Replace the manpage with a tiktok clone. Every video clip is a different section of the manpage. /s
  • NamlchakKhandro 39 minutes ago
    Why do people keep creating MCP servers.

    All you need is bash

  • finthehuman 1 hour ago
    Claude reads them.
  • Eisenstein 2 hours ago
    So, how do your users uninstall it when they don't want it any more?
  • Brajeshwar 3 days ago
    Isn’t that the first one reads, when one wants to Setup? What changed?
  • Titled86 2 hours ago
    lol too true, learned this the hard way