From Zero (Really Zero) to OpenTelemetry

A walkthrough of using an AI coding agent (e.g., Claude Code) with the open-source dash0hq/agent-skills skill collection to scaffold a Spring Boot app from scratch and instrument it with OpenTelemetry. The post provides a ready-to-use prompt that creates a minimal Java 21/Maven Spring Boot app with two endpoints, downloads the OpenTelemetry Java agent, configures OTLP export to Dash0 via gRPC, and sets up a gitignore-safe run.sh. It explains why each prompt element matters — explicit skill naming, concrete config values, gRPC protocol callout, and token safety — and lists follow-up prompts for custom spans, span naming fixes, and adding an OTel Collector.