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Day-One Ready: Verified Repo Onboarding
New developers lose days to weeks on unfamiliar codebases: stale READMEs, setup steps nobody has verified in months, and no clear entry point for a first contribution. Day-One Ready fixes this by turning onboarding into a repeatable, verified pipeline built entirely from IBM Bob 2.0 custom modes. We designed five specialist roles as custom modes in .bob/custom_modes.yaml, each with least-privilege tool access: Onboarding Architect and Doc Auditor are read-only and cannot touch source code; only Setup Verifier can execute commands; Onboarding Lead orchestrates the pipeline and uses Bob's Explore subagent for isolated, parallel-style investigation. The pipeline produces a self-contained HTML onboarding guide with an architecture diagram, a doc-vs-code drift report, verified setup instructions, proposed first tasks, and an 8-question comprehension quiz. Critically, Setup Verifier doesn't just describe how to run a project — it actually runs it. We proved this on two unmodified test repos with the exact same mode files: Metrixis (Node/Express/Postgres), where it found an undocumented, unsalted IP-hashing secret; and taskapi (Flask/SQLite), where it caught a hardcoded debug=True that exposes a live Werkzeug debugger PIN in production. In both cases it also hit and self-corrected real platform issues (a Windows npm shim bug, a missing pytest dependency) rather than reporting a false pass. The full pipeline — five specialist passes plus final assembly — costs under 2 Bobcoins per repo. Every output is honest about its limits: our scorecard explicitly lists what wasn't verified (e.g. no live database available), because an onboarding tool you can't trust is worse than none at all.
27 Sep 2026
