Setup by instructions or spec

When trying a new repo, it is useful to ask an agent to do the setup as a troubleshooting exercise: read the docs, install the prerequisites, run the expected commands, and debug the errors that come up.

That also suggests a useful design constraint for projects: setup can be expressed as textual instructions rather than hidden inside setup scripts. If an agent can follow the instructions from a clean checkout, the docs are probably good enough for a human too.

You can push the same idea further and make the product itself generated from a spec. OpenAI’s symphony is an example of a repository shaped around that kind of spec-driven generation.