Alpha Demo on preconfiguration.com

Draft and Build Case Study: Five Files Read, One Spec Drafted, Setups Written for Five Platforms

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Most repositories already say what they need. A .python-version file names the Python, requirements.txt the packages, a compose file the databases the developers run, .env.example the variables. What they don’t have is that knowledge in the form an agent platform reads, once for each platform.

In the Alpha demo, orders-api is a small Python service with no setup files for any agent. preconfig detect reads the files it has and drafts preconfig.yaml. preconfig build then writes the setup files for five platforms. The draft turned out to be the spec the team had written by hand, line for line apart from its comments.

Hand-Written Setup Case Study: Fifteen Errors in One Service's Agent Setup, None Flagged When It Was Written

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A team that uses two or three agents writes the same setup two or three times: once as a Copilot workflow, once as a Cursor environment, once as a dev container. Each file is written at a different time, from a different example, by whoever needed it that week. Nothing checks them against each other, and most platforms say nothing when a file is wrong until an agent tries to use it.

Clean Machine Case Study: Ready in 49.6 Seconds, and a Missing Redis Caught at the Ready Step

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A setup file that looks right proves nothing. The only proof is a machine that starts empty, runs the setup, and then passes the project’s own tests. That is what an agent’s cloud machine does every time a session starts, and when the setup is wrong, the agent finds out in the middle of its task, if at all. GitHub’s documentation says that when a setup step fails, Copilot skips the remaining steps and begins working with the machine as it is.

Upgrade Case Study: PostgreSQL 16 to 17 in One Line, With Every Platform's Files Following

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Setup files are written once and changed many times. Every upgrade of a runtime or a database has to reach every file that installs it: the dev container, the Copilot workflow, the Cursor environment, the server script. Miss one, and one agent works on a different version from everyone else, which shows up later as a bug nobody else can reproduce.

In the Alpha demo, the orders-api team moves from PostgreSQL 16 to 17. One line changes in preconfig.yaml. preconfig check lists every file that is now out of date, preconfig build rewrites them, and check is clean again.