Do Agents Need Quickstart Guides?
I integrated the same app with Infisical twice, once with a quickstart I'd written from experience and once without. The guided run cost half as much, took half as many context lines, and used the integration approach Infisical actually recommends.
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Do Agents need Quickstart Guides?April 13, 2026 · 10 min readLewis DwyerSoftware engineer and technical writerCompanies are laying off their entire documentation teams. Who needs them, when agents can figure stuff out without documentation, or write documentation themselves? But I've been noticing that even when building with agents, quickstart guides seem to help. We first saw this while working on documentation for a client: before the quickstart existed, agents struggled to produce anything that was a good representation of the product's features. After it was published, agents found it, followed it, and the results were noticeably better. To test if the benefit of quickstart guides was repeatable, I picked Infisical, a widely-used secrets manager with solid documentation, but with short and incomplete getting started guides. I gave Claude the same integration task twice, first with only the existing documentation and then again after adding a new and detailed quickstart. With the new guide, Claude reached a goal faster and without any additional help from me. It used half the number of tokens, and it chose to use the CLI instead of the SDK which was more appropriate for the task. Here's a summary of the most interesting results. Without guideWith guideOutput tokens66,90921,835Total API cost$3.00$1.28Completed autonomouslyNoYes Figuring out the 'hello world' of Infisical To figure out what a new platform is and how it works, it's useful to build whatever the 'hello world' equivalent is. For Infisical this is using the CLI to create a project add a secret retrieve the secret I found some friction caused by figuring out which of several plausible-looking paths was the right one. Infisical has Machine Identities, Universal Auth, project-level and org-level access controls, a CLI, SDKs in a dozen languages, and a broad documentation site. None of that is bad, but for someone new there's no obvious "start here" path. The agent and I hit the same walls. Creating a Machine Identity at the wrong level was the first. The agent directed me to Organisation Access Control → Identities, but the correct path is under Project Access Control → Machine Identities, a different section with a different flow. Without knowing the distinction between org-level and project-level identities, I spent time clicking through the wrong menus. Then there was infisical bootstrap, which sounds like the entry point for first-time setup. However, it only works for self-hosted instances. On Infisical Cloud, it doesn't exist. The agent tried it, got an error, and had to reroute. After a few sessions of trial and error, I had a working mental model with a basic understanding of the key concepts, which CLI commands actually matter, and what the right integration pattern looks like for a typical app. I had a toy project that could do the basic operations of adding and retrieving secrets from the platform. Then I wrote a quickstart guide to capture what I'd learned, trying to make something that could be useful for the next person (or agent) going through the same process. Beyond hello world: A URL Shortener That Needs a Database Secret With the quickstart written, I needed a test that resembles something real, even if still basic. I set up a URL shortener (without Infisical) to use as an example: an Express app backed by Postgres, storing slugs and redirect URLs in a database. The app reads DATABASE_URL from environment variables. My goal was to move that credential…
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