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👥 Meet Your Codebase Audiences

Every successful codebase serves multiple audiences with distinct needs, goals, and levels of technical expertise. Understanding these audiences is the first step toward creating interfaces that delight everyone who interacts with your code.

🎯 Pro Tip: Think of each audience as a different type of customer for your codebase product. What would make their experience exceptional?

👤 Service Consumers

🎯 Who they are: End consumers who want to understand and use what your project offers

💭 What they're thinking: "What does this do? How do I get started? Is this reliable?"

🎯 Their goals:

  • Quickly understand the project's purpose and value
  • Get up and running with minimal friction
  • Find help when things go wrong
  • Assess if the project meets their needs

💡 What they need:

  • Clear, jargon-free explanations
  • Quick start guides and examples
  • Installation/setup instructions
  • Usage documentation and tutorials

🌟 Success looks like: Consumers can understand your project and get started quickly.

👥 Contributors

🧑‍💻 Contributors

🎯 Who they are: Developers who want to improve, extend, or fix your codebase

💭 What they're thinking: "How can I help? What are the rules? Where should I start?"

🎯 Their goals:

  • Understand how to contribute effectively
  • Learn the codebase architecture and patterns
  • Follow the project's coding standards
  • Get their contributions accepted

💡 What they need:

  • Contribution guidelines and processes
  • Development environment setup
  • Code style and architectural decisions
  • Issue tracking and communication channels

🌟 Success looks like: New contributors can make their first meaningful contribution quickly.

🛠️ Operators

🎯 Who they are: DevOps engineers, SREs, and system administrators who deploy, monitor, and maintain your service

💭 What they're thinking: "How do I deploy this safely? What could go wrong? How do I troubleshoot issues?"

🎯 Their goals:

  • Deploy the service reliably across environments
  • Monitor health and performance
  • Respond to incidents quickly
  • Maintain security and compliance

💡 What they need:

  • Deployment guides and requirements
  • Monitoring and alerting setup
  • Troubleshooting runbooks
  • Security and configuration best practices

🌟 Success looks like: Operators can deploy with confidence and resolve issues without escalating to developers.

🤖 AI Agents

🎯 Who they are: GitHub Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI tools that assist with development

💭 What they're thinking: "How is this codebase structured? What patterns should I follow? What context do I need?"

🎯 Their goals:

  • Understand codebase structure and patterns
  • Generate relevant and helpful suggestions
  • Follow project conventions and standards
  • Provide accurate assistance to developers

💡 What they need:

  • Clear project structure documentation
  • Coding patterns and conventions
  • Context about architectural decisions
  • Examples of common tasks and workflows

🌟 Success looks like: AI tools provide accurate, helpful suggestions that follow your project's patterns and standards.

🚀 Build Agents

🎯 Who they are: CI/CD systems, automated testing tools, and build pipelines

💭 What they're thinking: "What commands should I run? What constitutes success? Where are the artifacts?"

🎯 Their goals:

  • Execute consistent, reliable builds
  • Run comprehensive test suites
  • Generate and publish artifacts
  • Maintain quality gates and standards

💡 What they need:

  • Standardized task definitions
  • Clear build and test commands
  • Dependency management
  • Artifact and deployment specifications

🌟 Success looks like: Builds are predictable, fast, and provide clear feedback on what succeeded or failed.

🔄 The Interconnected Web

These audiences don't exist in isolation - they interact and overlap:

  • Consumers often become Contributors when they want new features
  • Contributors often become Operators when deploying their work
  • AI Agents assist all other audiences in their tasks
  • Build Agents validate the work of Contributors before Operators deploy

Understanding these relationships helps you create interfaces that serve multiple audiences effectively.

What's Next?

Now that you understand the audiences, it's time to explore the interfaces designed for each audience.