eugene onboarding experience

Friction experienced by Eugene during onboarding

Wiki

The repo could use more clear instructions on what to do to actually bring it up locally so you can add friction :) Something like this:

git clone ...
docker build -t pl-wiki .
docker run -d -p 8080:8080 --name pl-wiki pl-wiki

The quartz docs have you run npm ci globally.

Also good to tell people they need to rebuild the container when they edit something.

Setting up Honcho for the first time

Would be good to explicitly say to find the LLM_OPENAI_API_KEY in the engineering 1password.

Something should say that the deriver needs to be run separately via something like uv run python -m src.deriver.

Setting up Excadrill

Needs GCS keys, weren’t in 1password - Yuya to add.

Running excadrill run beam --pool-size 1 --batch-size 1 --context-length 100K requires --honcho-root to be set to the path to your local honcho repo clone. But actually --honcho-root is not supported and needs HONCHO_PROJECT_ROOT instead:

HONCHO_PROJECT_ROOT=~/workspace/honcho excadrill run beam --pool-size 1 --batch-size 1 --context-length 100K

Needs an LLM_OPENAI_COMPATIBLE_API_KEY before the above will run. Should ideally be an OpenRouter key and not a straight-up OpenAI key or something.

Don’t let this finish, if you’re seeing log messages from the deriver that look something like this, you’re good - just Ctrl+C:

[Deriver [0]] 2026-07-07 16:58:15,766 - src.telemetry.logging - INFO - PERFORMANCE minimal_deriver_59_user | starting_message_id=58 | ending_message_id=59 | context_preparation=0ms | llm_call_duration=2068ms | total_processing_time=2665ms | observation_count=18

The terminalbench2 run requires an LLM_ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, you can find it in the engineering 1password.