Developers want scripts and tools — not “how-to” guides

Does this scenario sound familiar to you?

You want to do X on the command line. You Google search for an article on “how to do X.”

The first result: “How to do X” from developers.x.com, last updated this year.

Perfect! The official docs, and they’re even up to date! Of course, you click on it.

You read through the article, and you copy and paste the commands into your terminal. Before each command, there’s a detailed explanation of what each command is supposed to do, so you feel confident that this article is not going to leave you with a bricked computer.

“Great!” you think to yourself. The commands worked flawlessly, and you got X done.

Two months later…

You want to do X again. But this time, you’re a bit more time pressured. You really want to do Y, but you need to get X done before you can do Y.

So, to refresh your memory, you Google search “how to do X.” You see the same article: “How to do X.”

It lists out the same commands.

You copy and paste each of the commands.

“Ugh, this is so tedious!” you think to yourself. “I don’t want to read all of this! I don’t care about how to do X! I just want to do Y!”