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Comment by schipperai | Hacker News Reader

The tool is more than templating and automation. It adds a workflow for inspecting and composing the instructions.

The TUI and the docs understand how each coding agent runtime loads instructions into context (they all have nuanced differences) including local overrides, or what gets prioritised in case there is conflict (for instance, Pi accepts both CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md).

Your agent can load the docs to understand nuances and help you manage how you want instructions to get loaded. You can use the TUI to render the concatenated instructions as they are loaded into your agent.

So yes, templating could be replaced with smth like Ansible, but the tool solves a bit more than just that.

Thanks for the question!

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I can, and do, do all that with ansible in my homelab setup. It's a cognative dissonance to downplay alternatives to make your features somehow unique. No LLMs are needed for this, if I were you, I would ask an agent to implement this in ansible just to see

Ansible can of course handle the templating and deployment. Not arguing that.

mdmanager packages runtime-specific discovery, reusable Sections and Profiles, an instruction-focused TUI, and bundled CLI docs into something you can install and use.

You could build that with Ansible too, but the interface, domain rules, documentation, and maintenance are part of what you’d be building. Packaging all the nuances of 4 runtimes in was a lot of work.

If your existing setup already gives you everything you need, great. You don’t need this. That doesn’t make a dedicated tool redundant for everyone else.

“Ansible can do that” is a reasonable implementation suggestion. Taken it too far then “Python can do that” becomes an objection to everything posted on HN.

And no LLM is required for discovery, rendering, or deployment. Using an agent to edit the configuration is a workflow choice.

ansible can do all of those things you are saying it cannot, it's a provisioning system, so your python analogy is more deflection than actual consideration of feedback, and honestly closer to what you have done, used a programming language to implement something that could be done in the tools we already use to provision systems in industry

it doesn't sound like you want feedback that challenges your assumptions, the point of sharing on HN should be to challenge your assumptions, because as the saying goes "no product survives first contact with users"

Point taken, I agree Ansible could have worked nicely for this tool. While I do think there's value in packaging the workflow into a ready-made tool.

I do appreciate the input, thanks!

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