Documentation21 categories
Write onboarding docs for a new teammate
Someone starts Monday and the setup knowledge lives in three people's heads.
Write onboarding documentation for an engineer joining this team, based on the material below. Cover, in this order: 1. **Day one**: accounts, access, tools, and the exact commands to get the project running locally. Every prerequisite stated, no step assuming prior context. 2. **The map**: the three or four systems that matter, what each does, and how a request flows through them. One paragraph each. 3. **How we work**: branching, review, testing, deploying, and what happens when something breaks. 4. **First task**: a specific, small, genuinely useful change they can ship in week one. 5. **Where things live**: dashboards, logs, secrets, design docs, the channel to ask in. 6. **Folklore**: the unwritten rules, the parts of the codebase everyone avoids, the recurring gotcha. Mark every step that is likely to fail and what to do when it does. Flag anything you could not answer from the material as a question for the team. Material:
Making it yours
- Paste your own material where the prompt asks for it. Everything above that line is instruction, not content.
- Delete any rule that does not apply to you. A shorter prompt that fits beats a thorough one that does not.
- If the answer comes back vague, add a line saying what you do not want. Constraints work better than encouragement.
Getting someone started. READMEs, setup guides, onboarding and glossaries for the person meeting this for the first time.
Related prompts
Structure a README that gets someone runningA project with working code and a README that says only its name.Write a getting-started guide that ends in a winNew users install the thing and then don't know what to do next.Build a glossary for this domainNew starters keep asking what a word means and getting three answers.One-line descriptionThe first sentence of a README, or a repo description field.What is this README missing?Before publishing a README you wrote in one sitting.Summarise this for a newcomerSomeone joins next week and this is the thing they'll meet first.
Keep this one
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