wakqasahmed 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:
- For setup:
.env,.env.example,.env.*,README,docker-compose*, framework config, and.github/workflows/*(everysecrets.*/vars.*reference is a value the wizard must produce). - For a migration or transition: the current state, the target state, and the irreversible actions between them.
Then show the user the ordered list of stages and the values each produces, and confirm: they may add, drop, or reorder.
Done when: every stage is named in order, and for each captured value you know (a) where the human gets it, (b) where it's written (.env, a GitHub secret, both, or nowhere; some stages are pure actions), and (c) whether it's secret (hidden entry) or public.
2. Map each stage's journey
For each stage, write the precise path a human follows: which URL to open, what to do there, where a value is shown, which variable it fills: e.g. "Dashboard → Developers → API keys → Reveal test key → copy". Where you don't actually know the current UI or the exact command, say so and ask the user or check the docs: never invent steps that may not exist.
Done when: every stage traces to concrete instructions a stranger could follow.
3. Author the wizard
Copy template.sh to the target path. Replace the example stage with one stage per step, in dependency order. Use the library helpers: stage, say/step, open_url, ask/ask_secret, write_env, set_secret/set_var, pause/confirm. Set TOTAL_STAGES to the number of stages you wrote.
Hold the bar the template sets: open the URL before asking for its value, use ask_secret for anything secret, write_env every persisted value, set_secret only the values CI actually needs, and confirm before any irreversible action. Each stage clears the screen so only the current step is visible: keep a stage to one focused task so nothing the human needs scrolls away. Don't touch the library above the marker.
4. Verify and hand off
bash -n <script>; runshellcheckif available.chmod +x <script>.- Don't run it end-to-end yourself: it opens browsers and blocks on human input. Trace it statically instead: every value from step 1 is captured and lands where step 1 said, and every
set_secretname exactly matches asecrets.*reference in CI. - Tell the user how to run it. If it's a repeatable setup path, commit it and link it from the README so the next person runs the script instead of asking an AI.