Set Up a Mac for AI Development by Starting With Your Repos

A new Mac does not need every developer tool. It needs the tools your actual projects use.

I built an interactive setup guide after moving a large set of existing repositories to an Apple Silicon Mac. The guide starts with a choice: which toolchains do your projects need? It can then generate an ordered command plan, with a check after each step.

The useful part is the inventory. If you are unsure what to select, clone your repositories and run the scanner. It reads project manifests and reports tool requirements. It does not install anything. You can paste its output into the guide to mark the relevant tools for your plan.

The guide covers common development tools such as Python, Node, Rust, Java, Docker, LaTeX, and audio or model utilities. It also distinguishes commands that were run on the source machine from standard commands that were not re-run for the guide. Password prompts remain yours to handle, and file writes check before replacing an existing file.

This is a workflow built from one real migration, not a universal image or provisioning script. If you are bringing an existing set of projects to a Mac, start with their manifests and let the evidence shape the install list.