The moment you decide a CLI tool should talk to an LLM, there’s a strong gravitational pull towards reaching for LangChain, or one of its many relatives. It’s the obvious move. It’s also, for most CLI work, a bit like hiring a removals firm …
I once spent the better part of an hour convinced a timeout setting was broken. I’d set it in the config file, the tool ignored it, and the code that read it looked perfectly correct. The setting was tiemout. I’d typed it wrong, and not one …
I had a constructor I was rather pleased with. Hand go-tool-base’s root command its props and as many sub-commands as you like, and off it goes. Then I needed to thread some config file paths through it, reached for the obvious “just add a …
Run a command in your favourite CLI tool and look at what comes back. Colour. Neatly aligned columns. A friendly little summary sentence. Lovely… if you happen to be a human with eyes.
But a good half of any tool’s users aren’t people at …
There’s a moment in the life of a lot of CLI tools where they stop being a CLI tool. Nobody quite decides it. It just happens. Someone needs the thing to also expose a little HTTP endpoint, or poll a queue, or run a scheduler, so it grows a …
Every CLI tool past a certain size grows a category of logic that doesn’t really belong to any one command, and yet has to happen for loads of them. Timing. An auth check. Panic recovery, so a crash becomes a clean error instead of a …
The same tool, in two different lives, wants two completely different kinds of log.
On my laptop I want logs I can actually read: colour, alignment, friendly timestamps. The very same tool running as a daemon in a container wants none of …
Here’s an error message I’ve been on the receiving end of more times than I’d care to count:
error: failed to read config file True. Also completely useless! I now know something is broken and I haven’t the faintest idea what to do about …
Go’s embed package is one of those features that makes you slightly giddy the first time you use it. One //go:embed directive and your default config, your templates, your docs are all baked into the binary. The tool just works the moment …
I name-dropped Props back in the introduction and then rather glossed over it, which was a bit unfair of me, because it’s the single most important design decision in the whole framework. So let’s give it the attention it actually deserves. …
