Walk through the pre-work onboarding checklist end to end and record what breaks

[ale210]

Overview

We need to confirm that the pre-work checklist a new member opens for themselves actually
works when followed literally, because nobody has run it start to finish since it was
written and we already know at least two of its links are wrong. A checklist that fails on
someone's first day is worse than no checklist, because it also teaches them that our
documentation cannot be trusted.

Action Items

• Open a real pre-work issue from the template and follow it top to bottom, in order, as
  though you had never seen the repo. Do not skip a step because you already know the
  answer — the point is to find where a newcomer stops.
• Record every failure as you hit it: dead links, wrong anchors, steps that assume access
  you were never granted, steps that are out of order, commands that error, and anything
  that needs knowledge the checklist never gave you.
• Pay particular attention to the AWS steps. The checklist has the member create a personal
  AWS account, an IAM user and group, an S3 bucket and a DynamoDB table, then run
  terraform apply. Confirm this still reflects what we want a new member to do and that
  the cost warnings are accurate.
• Confirm the meeting time in the checklist ("Wednesdays 6-8pm PST", no meetings on the 1st
  Wednesday) matches what the wiki says and what actually happens. These three sources
  currently disagree — see the sibling issue on the wiki meeting text.
• Post your findings as a comment on this issue, one line per defect, each with the line it
  occurred on and what you expected instead.
• For anything that is a quick, obvious correction, fix it in a PR against
  .github/ISSUE_TEMPLATE/pre-work-template-devops-security.md.
• For anything larger or that needs a decision, open a separate issue and link it here
  rather than expanding this one.
• After the PR merges, open one more fresh pre-work issue from the template and confirm the
  corrected links resolve. Template changes only render from the default branch, so this
  genuinely cannot be checked from your branch.

Resources/Instructions

• Template under test: pre-work-template-devops-security.md
• Target of most of its links: CONTRIBUTING.md
• Two broken links are already known and ticketed as Fix two broken CONTRIBUTING.md links in the pre-work issue template #163 — do not re-report or re-fix
  those two. This issue is the wider sweep for everything Fix two broken CONTRIBUTING.md links in the pre-work issue template #163 does not cover.
• Close the pre-work issue you opened for this walkthrough when you are done, so it is not
  mistaken for a real member's onboarding.