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The best docs measure one thing: time-to-first-success
💡 A quickstart's job isn't to explain everything — it's to get a newcomer to one real, working result as fast as possible.
When you open the docs for a new tool, you don't want a tour of its philosophy — you want it to work. That's why great documentation is built around a quickstart: the shortest possible path from "I just installed this" to "it did something real." The metric that matters is time-to-first-success — how many minutes until a newcomer sees output they didn't have before.
This is why a Claude Code or API quickstart leads with a single copy-paste-ready command or code block, not a wall of prerequisites. Every extra choice — which flag, which config file, which auth method — is a place where a beginner stalls and closes the tab. Good quickstarts ruthlessly defer those decisions, hard-coding sensible defaults so the first run just works, and pointing to deeper guides for later.
The payoff is psychological, not just practical. A person who gets one early win trusts the tool and keeps going; a person who hits an error on step one assumes the whole thing is broken. This is the opposite of reference documentation, which aims to be complete. A quickstart aims to be fast and forgiving — it can even omit true details if that gets you to a working result sooner.