I replaced my boilerplate's setup wizard with a prompt

When someone clones a SaaS boilerplate, they spend the next 3 hours clicking through provider dashboards, dropping env vars into .env, and debugging why pnpm dev can't connect to their database. Every boilerplate I've used or shipped has tried to automate this away. They all failed in the same way.

Here's what failed for me in the past:

CLI wizards (pnpm setup). You answer 40 questions. Great on the first run. But half the answers require you to leave the terminal, open a browser, navigate a dashboard, copy something, come back, and paste. The CLI has no way to show you the Clerk sidebar. It just asks. If you paste the wrong thing, it blows up three steps later.

Setup videos. Great marketing, useless for actual setup because Clerk's UI looked different 6 months ago and Stripe's is different again.

.env.example with comments. You read them. You get confused. You Google. You find a 2023 Stack Overflow that doesn't match the 2025 UI. You give up.

The thing all three approaches miss is that setup has two kinds of steps:

Running a command — deterministic, perfect for automation
Clicking through a provider dashboard — non-deterministic, needs a human plus a guide
What works, in my experience, is the second kind of step getting someone sitting next to you saying "click API Keys, then Secret, paste it here." That's not a wizard. That's a coach.

So I made the coach a prompt you paste into Claude Code.

The prompt
I just cloned this SaaS boilerplate into the current directory and I've never set up a dev environment. My operating system is [Mac / Linux / Windows]. Walk me through everything one step at a time, pausing after each:

1. Check whether pnpm is installed. If not, run npm install -g pnpm and wait for me to confirm.
2. Read AGENTS.md so you understand the repo.
3. Run cp .env.example .env.
4. Ask me whether I received a license key. If yes, paste it into .env.
5. Walk me through filling in .env one provider at a time — Clerk, then Supabase, then Anthropic. For each, tell me exactly what to click and which values to paste where. Pause after each.
6. Run pnpm install, pnpm setup:db, pnpm dev.
7. Guide me to localhost:5173, sign up, and generate one AI response. Rules: one command or dashboard at a time; show file edits as diffs before applying; if I paste an error, diagnose before retrying. Paste that into Claude Code, Cursor, or Codex CLI inside a cloned repo and the AI does the rest. 30–45 minutes later you have a running SaaS.

What the AI is actually doing
It reads AGENTS.md (a repo-specific guide I ship) and knows the file layout, build commands, and which providers are wired. When it asks you to go to Clerk's dashboard, it knows to then write VITE_CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY, CLERK_PUBLISHABLE_KEY, and CLERK_SECRET_KEY (three fields, two of which are the same value — the kind of detail a CLI wizard gets wrong). When you paste what you think is a secret key and it's actually a publishable key, the AI catches it from the prefix (sk_ vs pk_) and asks you to re-paste.

It handles errors you paste back verbatim ("pnpm: command not found means…"). It handles dashboard UI changes, because it reads what's on screen (in your explanation) rather than relying on a 6-month-old screenshot.

What I learned
Paste-a-prompt beats click-a-wizard because the AI sees the whole repo as context and can show you diffs of changes before applying them.
"One thing at a time" is the single most important rule in the prompt. The AI will otherwise try to parallelize and lose you.
Env var updates shown as visible diffs (not silent writes) build trust.
This only works because AI coding tools became mainstream in 2025. A year ago I'd have written a CLI wizard and it would've been worse.
Try it
The boilerplate is at akamaru.dev. Open the README's "vibe-code path" section, paste the prompt into Claude Code / Cursor / Codex, and you should have a running SaaS in 30–45 minutes.

The interesting part for me wasn't the Clerk + Paddle + Supabase + Anthropic wiring — every boilerplate has some version of that. It was realizing that first-time-user experience is now a thing you delegate to an LLM instead of hand-crafting a wizard for.

Has anyone else moved their onboarding flow into a prompt? I'd love to hear how it went.