From dotfiles repo to developer platform

Every developer has lived it: a new machine arrives, and the next two days disappear into installing tools, copying dotfiles from an old laptop, and discovering, weeks later, the one PATH entry that was never restored. The knowledge of how your environment works lives nowhere except your shell history.

DevForgeKit began as a bootstrap script that could provision a factory-fresh Mac in one command. But provisioning turned out to be the easy part. The hard part is everything after: knowing what’s installed and why, whether tools work together, what breaks if you upgrade, and how to switch identities between a client project and your open-source work without leaking the wrong git email.

Thirty-plus releases later, those questions each have an engine: 261 registry packages with dependency resolution, 196 compatibility rules, an environment graph, a repair engine with rollback, workspaces with encrypted secrets, and an AI assistant grounded in real environment state, all held together by 1,354 tests.