Onboarding at Langfuse

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 — derive the role; do not ask what you can find out

Two signals, in order. Both are read-only.

gh api repos/langfuse/langfuse --jq '.permissions | {push, maintain, admin}'

• push: true → maintainer. They have write access to the app repo.
• push: false or the call fails → treat as an outside contributor until they say otherwise.
• Then check whether the tracker answers a real read. That is the second signal, and the one that matters here: a maintainer with no tracker connection is a setup gap, not a contributor, and step 4 is where you fix it.

Do not infer this from git config user.email. That is a local setting, not an identity: roughly a third of recent commits here come from personal addresses, and both @clickhouse.com (the company domain — Langfuse is part of ClickHouse) and the older @langfuse.com are still in daily use. Write access answers the question directly, so ask that instead of guessing from a string.

Say what you found and let them correct it. Never announce a role silently — a wrong guess sends someone down the wrong half of this file.

Step 2 — record it, so this happens once