Source: mattpocock/skills — engineering/wizard, imported verbatim 2026-08-26, including template.sh.

Wizard

A wizard is a bash script that walks a human, step by step, through a manual procedure that's tedious to do by hand and tedious to re-explain to an AI every time. It opens each URL, says exactly what to click and copy, captures the values, writes them where they belong (.env, GitHub secrets), confirms at every stage, and shows how many stages are left. It might configure third-party services, run a one-off migration, or move the project from one state to another.

The delightful UX is already solved by template.sh: stage-by-stage progress, confirmation gates, cross-platform URL opening (including WSL), hidden secret entry, idempotent .env upserts, gh secret/gh variable writes, and a closing summary. Your job is only to scope the procedure and author its stages. The library above the STAGES marker is identical in every wizard; that consistency is the point: never hand-edit it.

A wizard is ephemeral by default: built for one run, saved to a scratch or scripts/ path, deleted when the job's done. Commit it only when the user wants a repeatable setup path that should live in the repo.

When this pairs with hitl-blocker

hitl-blocker files a GitHub issue describing a human-only blocker (missing credential, DNS, billing, account permission) and stops there. wizard goes one step further: once the blocker is understood, generate a wizard script that actually walks the human through resolving it, instead of leaving them with a bare issue description to figure out alone. Use hitl-blocker to make the blocker visible; use wizard to make it easy to clear.

Process

1. Scope the procedure

Work out every manual step the human must take and every value that gets captured along the way. Read the repo first, don't ask cold: