--- title: "Markdown is the new Installer" type: post url: "https://robotpaper.ai/markdown-is-the-new-installer/" canonical: "https://robotpaper.ai/markdown-is-the-new-installer/" markdown_url: "https://robotpaper.ai/markdown-is-the-new-installer.md" published: "2026-07-01T19:31:00.000+00:00" updated: "2026-10-22T21:57:56.000+00:00" tags: ["Developer-Experience"] author: "Roy Osherove" author_links: ["https://robotpaper.ai", "https://x.com/royosherove", "https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/", "https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7", "https://robotpaper.ai/about-roy.md"] description: "No more MSI or drag-to-install. A well-crafted bootstrap prompt lets your users' local agent install complex tools for them. Why markdown is the new installer." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original post)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Markdown is the new Installer No more [MSI](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/msi/windows-installer-portal). No more dragging. No more downloading. A well crafted bootstrapping prompt provided to your users can mean you can create ever more complex tools and apps that might be terrible to install from a human-perspective, but for an agent they are easy-as-pie to go through. Your users fire up their favorite local agent, paste your bootstrap, and a minute or so later things are installed. Yes - it's not deterministic. but it also means the process is much more (surprisingly) reliable since it can deal with a lot of unknowns (user OS, local environment, misconfigurations , limitations and unforeseen actions by the user) in a much more elaborate way. Intelligent installers are the new "curl ...." copy-paste. We still need those, but agents run them. Tokens-per-install might become a new metric. At work we allow users with less technical knowledge to install [kiro](https://kiro.dev/), skills and mcps written by other people in the company, and actually get them to use them - undreamt of just a couple of years ago. The only remaining wall to climb no built in "paste and run" surface built into the OS yet: I still can't get my mom to paste a prompt though. She needs a local desktop agent and that's too much for her. Web version is good enough (in moderation). --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove** - Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: [https://x.com/royosherove](https://x.com/royosherove) - LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/) ### Contact - Contact form: [https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7](https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7) ### License Content on robotpaper.ai is licensed under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original post). More about Roy and his other sites and projects: [https://robotpaper.ai/about-roy.md](https://robotpaper.ai/about-roy.md)