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KiloClaw

Onboarding First-Week Kit

From repo access to first merged PR, fast

Onboard new engineers, QA, DevOps, and PMs without tribal knowledge. Standardize access, environment setup, architecture orientation, and a first safe change.

CommunitySubmitted by CommunityWork20 min

INGREDIENTS

🐙GitHub📄Google Docs💬Slack📅Calendar

PROMPT

Create a skill called "Onboarding First-Week Kit". Inputs I will provide: - Repo(s) and team role(s) onboarding - Tech stack and runtime constraints - Existing README/CONTRIBUTING/runbooks (if any) The skill must: - Produce a role-specific onboarding checklist with owners - Specify a one-command local bootstrap path and smoke tests - Create a concise architecture map and "safe change zones" - Propose 3 starter tasks and a first-PR review plan (buddy + SLA) - Output a week plan and a doc-update plan for onboarding gaps Output in Markdown. Keep it pragmatic and actionable.

How It Works

This recipe turns onboarding into a repeatable, measurable workflow: access → local run →

first small ticket → first PR review → first merge.

Triggers

  • A new engineer, QA, DevOps, or PM joins the team
  • A contributor needs to work in a new repo/service for the first time
  • "It takes days to get productive" keeps recurring

Steps

  1. Generate an access checklist (source control, CI, secrets, dashboards, staging) with owners.
  2. Define a single "happy path" setup (prefer 1 command) and validate it in CI.
  3. Create a one-page architecture orientation: entrypoints, key data flows, service boundaries.
  4. Select a starter task that is small, reversible, and easy to validate.
  5. Pair the first PR with a "review buddy" and set a same-day review SLA.
  6. Capture every onboarding bump and immediately update docs/scripts to prevent repeats.

Expected Outcome

  • New contributors can run the system locally and ship a small change within days.
  • Onboarding failures become visible as checklist gaps (missing access, broken docs, drift).

Example Inputs

  • "New backend engineer; stack is Go + Postgres + Kafka; start date Monday."
  • "New QA needs to run E2E locally and in CI."
  • "PM needs to reproduce a bug and verify the fix on staging."

Tips

  • Prefer repo-adjacent docs (versioned) over wikis that drift.
  • Treat onboarding breakage like a production bug: fix it quickly or it compounds.
Tags:#onboarding#documentation#developer-experience#productivity