I have a slightly complicated relationship with BDD. I’ve watched it turn a tangled test suite into something the whole team could read and reason about, and I’ve watched it turn a perfectly good unit test into a paragraph of ceremonial …
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 …
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. …
Here’s a question that sounds trivial and really isn’t: where, exactly, does a CLI tool’s structure live? Not the logic of each command… the structure. Which commands exist, what they’re called, which flags they take, what’s nested under …
