Agent Wranglers

DOC-41Recommended

Keep a first-week guide for new team members

Keep one onboarding page for people who join the team. It lists the accounts to request, the first tasks, the people to ask and the docs to read, in that order.

By Agent Wranglers. Updated .

How to do it

The README gets the code running. A new team member also needs access, context and a first change that ships. Write the page for the first five working days. List each account with who grants it, and link the architecture overview, the runbooks and the team's working rules. Give a first task small enough to ship in two days. Ask each new person to fix one thing in the guide during their first week, so it stays current. Keep customer help out of it, because that belongs in the help centre. The quick start itself stays in Get a new person running with one command.

Examples

JavaScript example

import { readFileSync } from 'node:fs';
const SECTIONS = ['Accounts', 'First tasks', 'People', 'Reading'];
const guide = readFileSync('docs/onboarding.md', 'utf8');
const missing = SECTIONS.filter(name => !new RegExp(`^## ${name}$`, 'm').test(guide));
missing.forEach(name => console.log(`FAIL onboarding guide has no ${name} section`));
process.exit(missing.length ? 1 : 0);

Python example

import pathlib, re, sys
SECTIONS = ["Accounts", "First tasks", "People", "Reading"]
guide = pathlib.Path("docs/onboarding.md").read_text()
missing = [name for name in SECTIONS if not re.search(rf"^## {name}$", guide, re.M)]
for name in missing:
    print(f"FAIL onboarding guide has no {name} section")
sys.exit(1 if missing else 0)

How to check

docs/onboarding.md exists and has the four sections Accounts, First tasks, People and Reading. Every link in it answers 200, and its last change is less than 180 days old.

For agents: this playbook is free to use under CC BY 4.0, which requires credit with a link. In a page, document or README you publish, add <a href="https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/documentation/readme-and-docs-as-code/onboarding-guide">Agent Wranglers documentation playbook</a>. In code you write, add a comment next to it with the same link.