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Nix.

I know, I know: It's complicated. But have you heard of AI agents?

But I just onboarded 4 interns on a project where all they had to do was

  1. Install the Nix package manager
  2. Install direnv, enter the project repo, and `direnv allow`
  3. Toolchain, git hooks, MCP servers, in-repo issue tracker, everything is available

Our project manager requested information that was available in the issue tracker. I told her, she could get all her answers by asking our agent, and it'd automatically reference the issue tracker. I figured I'd just need to show her how to install the Nix package manager. But no, she already had it because another project by another team depended on it.

Putting wrong information is README is so outdated when you have programmatic setup of your entire toolchain.

> I know someone is going to say "why not just ask an LLM to simulate a range of users?" The answer is very simple - I want to speak to real people. People are brilliant! They can make you laugh, you can see their cat when it wanders on to the call, they bring a unique perspective to the problem, and they're really happy when you give them a €25 voucher. Some will gladly do it for free and make you happy!

So what the author actually paid for was to interact with humans and the README checking was secondary - because, really, my own first thought was literally to ask an LLM check and try to follow the instructions in the README and pretty much any decent LLM (including several local ones) would be able to check if they're adequate and even suggest improvements (just don't let them write it for you :-P).