Generate Comprehensive Developer Onboarding Guides

This skill creates comprehensive developer onboarding guides that take new hires from zero to productive contributor efficiently. Content follows progressive disclosure - essential Day 1 material layered up to advanced Week 4+ material, with small wins early building toward complex contributions - and explicit assumption documentation, since guides should never assume familiarity with internal tools, processes, or domain concepts. Guides include verification checkpoints so new developers can confirm their setup and understanding before moving on, and are designed as living documents with clear ownership, last-updated dates, and a feedback mechanism.

Use it when structuring a new developer's first days, weeks, and months at a company with concrete, measurable milestones rather than a loose reading list. It is not meant to be static: the maintenance process requires a feedback form after every onboarding plus a quarterly review, with updates flowing through a PR to the team-docs repository.

Given a team and codebase, it produces a pre-day-one checklist (account access, security training, software install, Slack channels, bookmarked links) and explicit day-one success criteria (running the app locally, landing one trivial code change, understanding communication norms, knowing who to ask), an automated environment-setup script, a troubleshooting section documenting common issues with a problem, solution, and time-to-fix format, a codebase navigation guide (a high-level architecture diagram and an annotated directory tree), and a four-level graduated first-task sequence - a good-first-issue in days 1-2, a starter task in days 3-5, a learning task touching one system component in week 2, and an integration task spanning multiple parts by weeks 3-4 - each task templated with difficulty, estimated time, skills practiced, context, an acceptance-criteria checklist, and named resources.

#!/bin/bash
### dev-setup.sh - One-command development environment setup

echo "Setting up development environment..."

### Install dependencies
if command -v brew >/dev/null 2>&1; then
    brew install node python3 docker
else
    echo "Please install Homebrew first: https://brew.sh"
    exit 1
fi

### Clone repositories
git clone git@github.com:company/main-app.git
git clone git@github.com:company/shared-components.git

### Setup environment variables
cp main-app/.env.example main-app/.env.local
echo "Please update main-app/.env.local with your local settings"

### Install dependencies and run initial setup
cd main-app
npm install
npm run setup:local

echo "Setup complete! Run 'npm start' to begin development."

Knowledge transfer runs through a buddy system (daily 30-minute check-ins in week 1, tapering to every-other-day through week 4, with a clear escalation path - try solving for 20-30 minutes, search Slack history, ask the team channel, then tag the buddy if urgent) and team communication protocols (a fixed daily-standup format, code review requiring 2 approvals within a 4-hour response window, and a documentation standard shown via a fully-tagged JSDoc example).

Engineering managers and team leads building a structured onboarding program, measured against explicit 30/60/90-day milestones - from completing good-first-issues and deploying to production at 30 days, through leading a small feature and giving code review feedback at 60 days, to mentoring a newer hire and contributing to architectural decisions at 90 days.