Comment by wassel

They often try, but two things bite in practice:

- Permissions and sandbox limits. Many agents don’t run on a dev’s laptop with admin access They run in the cloud or in locked down sandboxes: no sudo, restricted filesystem, restricted network egress. So “just install it” is sometimes not allowed or not even possible.

- It is a token and time sink and easy to go down the wrong path. Dependency errors are noisy: missing system libs, wrong versions, build toolchain issues, platform quirks. Agents can spend a lot of iterations trying fixes that don’t apply, or that create new mismatches.

Repo ready environments don’t replace agents installing deps. They just reduce how often they have to guess.