I abused PostHog's setup wizard to get free Claude access | Tech Stackups

Skip to main content<br>PostHog is a platform for product analytics and more. They're known for pushing boundaries (just look at their website) and being a leader in UX patterns, especially at the frontier of how to work with agents. I use the free tier for some side projects, but recently did a from-scratch set up while working on a comparison guide.

They have a newish "wizard" to set up their product for you. I used this for the first time and figured out how to abuse it to become a full on LLM provider for Pi, a coding agent harness similar to Claude Code. For a while, I got the thrill of enjoying apparently unlimited Anthropic tokens, but instead of seeing how far I could push that I reported it to PostHog and got a free T-shirt instead.

Pi configured with PostHog as an LLM provider<br>This post is a bit about onboarding in the age of LLMs, as I have some thoughts about that, and a bit about how I got free tokens, because it was fun and interesting.

What is the PostHog wizard​

The PostHog Wizard is a creative way to get started with PostHog. While other companies are writing LLMs.txt files and some other basics to help agent-first devs use their stuff, PostHog has really taken it to the next level.

If you're old, you'll remember Microsoft's setup wizards that actually had a wizard character and some next-next-next GUI dialogues to help you set up software. The PostHog wizard is nothing like that. It installs a full-blown Sonnet-powered agent on your machine, analyzes your codebase, figures out not just how to integrate PostHog into your codebase, but also what kind of metrics you'd probably be interested in tracking, what it makes sense to name them, and a whole bunch of other stuff. It's wild. And scary. And apparently it has unlimited access to Sonnet.

You just run npx -y @posthog/wizard@latest --region eu and take the leap of faith. They hijack your machine and project with an agent, it autonomously edits your codebase to integrate PostHog, and as a dev you just sit there wondering about things like "Universal Basic Income" while looking at the two hours of work done in eight minutes.

I didn't time it, but this looks like a hyped marketing claim before using it, but not at all afterwards.

My experience using the PostHog wizard​

I have a toy coffee ordering web app that I use to test out various developer tools in a realistic (if very small) setting. It's deliberately over-engineered to run on Kubernetes, have separate services, and a queueing system to make observability testing more realistic.

I simply changed to the frontend directory and ran the wizard command.

Maybe it's just my setup (pretty vanilla iTerm2) but it was quite janky. At first I thought it had frozen as I couldn't interact with any of the controls on what looked like a TUI, but I eventually figured that it uses scrolling to update and I could manually scroll down a million terminal screens to see it progressing.

I was expecting it to look at my project, analyze the framework, and tell me how to integrate PostHog. Or maybe even do the basics of the integration and tell me how to set it up from there. I hadn't read about it, I was just following the default and suggested options while signing up for a new account and starting a new project.

I wasn't expecting it to run a full blown agent on my codebase, figure out what my project does and what kind of metrics would make sense to track, fully one-shot integrate all the needed PostHog library installs and code changes, and let me just visit a functional analytics dashboard page. But it did all of that. Probably in about the claimed 8 minutes. I forgot to time it.

Here's what I saw after logging into the PostHog dashboard.

And this isn't just a hello-world page counting setup. The agent really understood my app and what makes sense to track. It set up events for things like 'Menu category filtered' and 'cart quantity updated' — actual functionality from my app that makes sense to track.

Wow.

Is this the future of onboarding?​

I don't think so. It's good, but it doesn't make sense for every company to build this. I run Claude Code already so I'd have preferred a skill or even just a prompt to copy-paste and probably get the same effect, without having to relinquish control of my codebase to a third party, or send my data to yet another server.

But I'm still part of what is probably a quite small minority of developers who has been actively using command line agents in yolo --dangerously-skip-permissions mode since June 2025. So from PostHog's perspective, it makes sense to control the experience to make it consistent for everyone no matter what tooling they're using or what flows they're used to seeing.

My guess is that a lot of onboarding in future will look quite similar to this, but it will be guided by the company (docs, skills, prompts, MCP, whatever) but executed by the developer's own agent,...