What they did
Flores works on an old .NET Framework 4.8 codebase with non-SDK project files, large Web.config files, NHibernate and IIS Express, which normally only runs from inside Visual Studio. He listed the four jobs the IDE did for him: locate MSBuild, build the projects in order, put the local config in place, and start IIS Express on the right site and port. He spent an afternoon turning those into a Markdown file in the repo, written for Claude Code. The file tells the agent to check that the local config exists and to stop and ask rather than make up secrets, copy it into place, build in order, start IIS Express in the background, and poll a health endpoint until the API answers. A troubleshooting section at the end records the failures he hit. Each morning he asks Claude Code to start the admin Web API, and it follows the file.
How it went
He says Claude Code now checks the config, builds, starts IIS Express, polls the health check and reports the port, and when something fails it reads the log file the runbook names. He edits in VS Code and runs everything through Claude Code, and he says his team uses the same file. He gives no timings or counts.
Worth knowing
Visual Studio still has to be installed: vswhere finds MSBuild inside it, and IIS Express still reads the applicationhost.config Visual Studio generated. One trap he wrote into the runbook is that Git Bash rewrites IIS Express's /config: switch as a file path, so the server refuses to start.
Postgresql
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