Comment by tombert

The biggest blocker for me would be that I would go through a "Getting Started" guide and that would go well until it doesn't. Either there would be an edge case that the guide didn't take into account or the guide would be out of date. Sometimes I would get an arcane error message that was a little difficult to parse.

There were also cases where the interesting part of what I'm working on (e.g. something with distributed computing) required a fair amount of stuff that I don't find interesting to get started (e.g. spinning up a Kafka and Zookeeper cluster), where I might have to spend hours screwing around with config files and make a bunch of mistakes before I get something more or less working.

If I was sufficiently interested, I would power through the issue, by either more thoroughly reading through documentation or searching through StackOverflow or going onto a project IRC, so it's not like I would never finish a project, but having a lower barrier of entry by being able to directly paste an error message or generate a working starter config helps a lot with getting past the initial hump, especially to get to the parts that I find more interesting.