One clean machine, one repo, one goal, and two transcripts of getting there. The metric is not time but decisions taken by a human — counted from the lines each transcript attributes to you. The asymmetry only appears at step five: a machine cannot be handed to the next person, and a recording of how it was built can.
they part company here — who executes
By hand
you execute, the README guides
The next person repeats every trap you already paid for.
Described
you decide, the agent executes
The next person runs one command — and improves the record.
the next personA week later somebody else joins. The left column is performed again, trap for trap, because a machine cannot be handed over — only a procedure can. On the right the procedure already exists, because it was written down by the thing that carried it out.
The left column ends with a working machine. The right column ends with a working machine AND a recording of how it got that way — and only one of those two things can be handed to the next person. That is the whole claim: describing a setup produces an artefact, performing one produces only a mood.