Langfuse Onboarding

Onboarding at Langfuse

Two jobs, and they are separable — most of the time you only want the first.

1. Configuration (steps 1, 2 and 4): work out who is using this agent, what they work on, and what they are connected to. Seconds, not a session. Someone who has been here a year needs this and nothing else — do not walk a colleague through a new-joiner path to find out their name.
2. Onboarding (steps 3 and 5): the walkthrough, for people who are actually new.

Everything an agent needs in order to behave differently for a contributor than for a maintainer comes from the first, so do that before anything else.

Step 1 — name them, then prove Linear; do not ask what you can find out

Normal path: scripts/agents/configure-langfuse-identity.sh already ran from repo postinstall or Cursor Cloud start and created ~/.config/langfuse/me.md from the Linear viewer. Read it and continue. It never overwrites an existing file, so the human's Focus and corrections survive across worktrees.

Run the local probe first, then stop at the first path that names a person:

bash .agents/skills/langfuse-onboarding/scripts/whoami.sh

It reports whether me.md exists, whether a Linear token is in the environment (boolean only — it never prints the secret), a linear_viewer line if that token works, and whether gh api user works. On Cursor Cloud, a working linear_viewer is tracker identity even when Linear MCP is needsAuth.

Who, in this order:

1. ~/.config/langfuse/me.md — already recorded. Skip to Linear.
2. Cursor Cloud run owner. If cursor-cloud tools exist, call run-info. Use owningUserName and owningUserEmail. Join the name to the roster (components-mdx/team-members.mdx in a docs checkout, or gh api repos/langfuse/langfuse-docs/contents/components-mdx/team-members.mdx). Maintainer needs Langfuse-team evidence: a roster row, or membership of the LF team on the Linear read below. Take the GitHub handle from the roster. An @clickhouse.com / @langfuse.com address alone is not that evidence — ClickHouse is far larger than this team, and a colleague from another team owns none of the Langfuse tracker. Say the address named them, that you found no Langfuse-team row, and ask once rather than assuming.
3. gh api user succeeded (desktop and similar). Then gh api repos/langfuse/langfuse --jq '.permissions | {push, maintain, admin}'. push: true → maintainer. push: false → contributor until they say otherwise.
4. If none of the above named them, ask once.

Do not treat Cursor Cloud gh as the person. That token is a read-only integration: gh api user is 403 and .permissions.push is false even for maintainers. Do not infer identity from git config user.email — on Cloud it is cursoragent@cursor.com, and elsewhere it is often a personal address. Langfuse is part of ClickHouse; @clickhouse.com and @langfuse.com are both in daily use.

Linear, in the same step — a maintainer with no tracker is a setup gap, not a contributor. Prove access with a real read, not a status indicator:

1. Linear MCP tools exist and the namespace is not needsAuth → query viewer (or list issues).
2. Else if whoami.sh reported a Linear token → GraphQL { viewer { name email } teams { nodes { name key } } } with that env var (never echo it), or linear-context-handover/scripts/lf-context.sh. Record the viewer as tracker identity, and treat the LF team in that response as the Langfuse-team evidence step 1 asked for. Cloud often has the secret while Linear MCP still shows needsAuth — the token is the access; do not wait on OAuth.
3. Else: no Linear. On Cursor Cloud, do not call mcp_auth — it only works in the desktop IDE. Tell them, in one line, to create a personal Linear API key (Linear → Settings → Account → Security) and add it as secret LINEAR_API_KEY at https://cursor.com/dashboard/cloud-agents, then start a new Cloud run. This run cannot see a secret added later. On desktop, authorizing the Linear MCP is enough; LINEAR_API_KEY is the headless fallback.

Say what you found and let them correct it. Never announce a role silently.

Step 2 — record it, so this happens once

Write ~/.config/langfuse/me.md. Machine-level on purpose: it has to answer the question in langfuse, in langfuse-docs, and in a scratch directory, so it cannot live in one repo. Create the directory if it does not exist.

# Me, at Langfuse

- **Name:** <name>
- **Role:** maintainer | contributor
- **GitHub:** <login>          # roster handle on Cloud; `gh api user` on desktop
- **Tracker identity:** <name / email as Linear knows it, or "none">
- **Focus:** <the areas they own or are learning — their own words>
- **Checkouts:** <path to langfuse> · <path to langfuse-docs> · <others>
- **Connectors verified:** <the ones that answered a real read> · **missing:** <the rest>
- *Recorded <date> by an agent. Edit freely; delete to be asked again.*

Never commit this file, and never put a secret in it. It is notes, not config: no tokens, no keys. A repo .env is the wrong home — those are app configuration and one careless git add publishes them.

Ask for Focus — once — rather than deriving it. What someone owns on paper and what they are responsible for this quarter are different things, and only they know the second. One question, their phrasing, written down so nobody asks again. If they would rather not answer, record that and move on; a missing Focus line is not a blocker.

Do not record what they own project by project — that is derivable and it goes stale within a week. linear-work-rhythm reads it live from the tracker instead.

Step 3a — the contributor path

Read CONTRIBUTING.md and walk it: setup, the four gating checks before opening a PR, and ## Maintainers for what is not theirs to do. .agents/AGENTS.md → Verification is the honest bar, including which checks pass without running.

Stop there. Do not describe the issue tracker, the label policy, the weekly rhythm, or the internal handbook — a contributor cannot open any of it, and offering it reads as a door that is locked.

Step 3b — the maintainer path, for people who are new

Skip this for an established colleague. If they have commits in this repo going back months, they know how the team ships; reading it back to them wastes their time and yours. Configuration plus step 4 is the whole job. Offer the walkthrough rather than starting it: "want me to go through the handbook pages, or just fix the two missing connectors?"

The handbook owns the content; you drive it. It is content/handbook/ in langfuse/langfuse-docs, published at langfuse.com/handbook. Read the pages, work through them with the person, and answer from what they actually say today — do not paraphrase them here, because this file would then be a second, stale copy of a document that changes without it.

Read it from origin/main, not the working tree. A docs checkout is usually parked on some branch from the last thing that person shipped, and a working-tree read then quotes a handbook from weeks ago without saying so. This is not hypothetical: the first run of this skill read a checkout 576 commits behind. Fetch, then read the blob — it needs no checkout switch and cannot disturb work in progress:

cd <docs checkout> && git fetch -q origin main
git show origin/main:content/handbook/product-engineering/how-we-work/onboarding.mdx

Start with:

Then, in the repos:

• .agents/AGENTS.md — always loaded, and the two things it names that nothing else does: what a green check really proves, and the context handover.
• linear-agent-writes — read before the first agentic tracker write.
• pr-stack-workflow — before the first change too large for one PR.

If a handbook page contradicts a skill or an AGENTS.md, say so. That is a finding worth reporting, not something to smooth over: one of the two is wrong, and the person reading both will trust the wrong one.

Step 4 — the connectors, and what breaks without each

Skills fail differently from code: an unauthorized connector does not error, the agent simply cannot answer, and neither of you finds out why. So walk this list and say which ones are missing rather than discovering it mid-task.

Datadog is the one that fails quietly, and it takes four skills with it. Slack has no hosted MCP server, so it arrives through whichever connector your tool provides rather than through this repo's config — check it the same way, because a linked thread you cannot open is a dead end mid-conversation. Prove each connector with a real read rather than trusting a status indicator — a remote server can report itself connected before it holds a token.

Two prerequisites on the same checklist that are not connectors: the langfuse-docs checkout below, which four skills read the handbook from, and a working local Docker, without which the seeder cannot make test data.

Step 5 — the checkouts, especially the docs one

A maintainer needs the app repo and the docs repo. The docs repo is the one people skip, and then documentation quietly stops happening because the alternative is a clone in the middle of a task.

git rev-parse --show-toplevel                        # where am I
ls -d ../langfuse-docs ~/code/langfuse-docs 2>/dev/null   # is the docs repo here

If langfuse-docs is missing, say so plainly and give the command — do not carry on and hope:

git clone git@github.com:langfuse/langfuse-docs.git

It carries the handbook, the docs, the changelog, and the team roster (components-mdx/team-members.mdx — names, roles, GitHub handles). Without it this skill cannot read step 3b, nobody can tell you who a commit author is, and no shipped change gets a docs page or a changelog entry without a separate detour.

Record the paths you found in me.md so the next session does not search again.

What this skill does not do

It does not decide what to work on — that is linear-work-rhythm, which reads me.md and answers from the tracker. If someone asks "what should I do today" and no identity file exists, run step 1 and 2 first. If Linear still does not answer, stop and ask them to set LINEAR_API_KEY (Cloud) or authorize the Linear MCP (desktop) — do not invent a day's work.