- 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.
Comments
Why can't agents install missing deps based on the error message?
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.