say that stopping and coming back costs nothing

Choosing option 1 means leaving to set up a server elsewhere, which could take an
afternoon. The run now says outright that Ctrl-C is fine and that returning picks
up here — completed steps skipped, answers kept — so nobody feels they have to
finish in one sitting or start over.

The same promise once at the top, where the resume notice already was. That
notice is now phrased as what it means rather than as file paths: "2 step(s)
already done, and they will be skipped", with the command to start over instead
of a bare mention of the file.

On the question of why pre-flight kept re-asking: it does not, and I caused what
you saw. Nearly every test command I have run today ended with
`sudo rm -f .setup-answers`, so the file was deleted between your runs. Proved the
round trip — a run with the variables set writes all three, and a second run with
no environment at all asks nothing and prints what it remembered. The file is
gitignored, so there was never a reason to be deleting it. Stopped.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

scripts/setup/machine-setup/machine-setup.sh

@@ -108,10 +108,15 @@ ask_machine_role
 info "Role:     ${MACHINE_ROLE}"
 
 if [[ -f "$PROGRESS_FILE" ]]; then
-  DONE_COUNT=$(wc -l < "$PROGRESS_FILE")
+  DONE_COUNT=$(wc -l <"$PROGRESS_FILE")
-  echo -e "${YELLOW}  Resuming — $DONE_COUNT step(s) already completed${NC}"
+  echo ""
-  echo -e "${YELLOW}  Progress file: $PROGRESS_FILE${NC}"
+  info "Resuming — ${DONE_COUNT} step(s) already done, and they will be skipped"
-  echo -e "${YELLOW}  To start fresh: rm $PROGRESS_FILE${NC}"
+  echo "     To start over instead:  sudo rm ${PROGRESS_FILE}"
+else
+  echo ""
+  echo "     This can be stopped at any point and run again later. Completed"
+  echo "     steps are remembered and skipped, and the answers below are kept,"
+  echo "     so coming back costs nothing."
 fi
 
 if [[ "$EUID" -ne 0 ]]; then
@@ -466,6 +471,12 @@ if ! skip; then
               echo ""
               echo "     Then come back here with its address and a key. Nothing below"
               echo "     will work until that server is up and answering."
+              echo ""
+              echo "     Take as long as you need. Stop this script whenever you like"
+              echo "     — Ctrl-C is fine — and run it again when you are ready. Every"
+              echo "     step already done is remembered and skipped, and the answers"
+              echo "     you have given are kept, so you will come back to this same"
+              echo "     question and nothing before it."
             fi
             # No default offered. A coordination server URL is somebody's private
             # infrastructure, and a machine that joins the wrong one has joined a