Designing dev onboarding for an agent-first world (castform.com)

In a bid to enhance the onboarding experience for developers in an increasingly agent-first AI world, Castform has reimagined its post-training platform. The company identified that traditional onboarding strategies like SDK-first notebooks and no-code wizards were failing to engage engineers, particularly as many now prefer delegating tasks to coding agents. The new approach simplifies onboarding to a single command and a plain-language prompt, allowing users to see tangible results within 5-10 minutes—crucial for capturing their interest. This redesign addresses two distinct developer profiles: experienced ML engineers and average AI engineers who have never engaged in post-training. Castform’s platform now uses coding agents as the primary interface, enabling developers to quickly obtain baseline evaluations of their tasks. The onboarding flow emphasizes immediate results over lengthy setups, significantly reducing friction and time to value. By allowing developers to utilize their coding agents for training environment design, example generation, and evaluation tasks, Castform effectively bridges the gap between novice and experienced users while prioritizing user engagement in the AI/ML community.