Reloading config without a restart
A config file changes. Someone edits a setting, rotates a credential, flips a feature flag. How does the running process find out? For most processes the answer is blunt: it doesn’t, until you restart it. For a …
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29 pages
Go
Verifying your own downloads: how I solved it for self-updating CLI tools
Way back in the introduction I promised I’d come back to the self-update integrity checks. Here we are. And the honest starting point is a slightly uncomfortable admission: for a good long while, go-tool-base’s update …
What survives a port, and what doesn't
Rebuilding go-tool-base in Rust turned out to be the most honest design review I’ve ever sat through, and I didn’t have to do anything except keep going. Porting a framework into a language with completely different …
rust-tool-base: the same idea, in a language that argues back
I built go-tool-base because I was sick of rebuilding the same CLI scaffolding every time I started a new Go tool. You’d think that would have taught me a lesson about doing things more than once. Apparently not, because …
The blank import that keeps a dependency out of your binary
go-tool-base can stash your credentials in the OS keychain, which most people building on it are perfectly happy about. But some of them ship into regulated and air-gapped environments where the binary isn’t permitted to …
Where should a CLI keep your API keys?
Your CLI tool needs the user’s API key. It has to come from somewhere, and it has to survive between runs, so the obvious move is to ask once and write it into the config file. One tidy api_key: line. Job done. It works …
I had the framework audited: every finding was the same shape
When a real security audit lands back in your inbox, the temptation is to read it as a shopping list of unrelated mistakes. Fix one, fix the next, tick them off, move on. I did exactly that the first time. The second …
The test-mocking pattern that races
I’m going to tell you about a bug go-tool-base shipped, because it’s one of those bugs that’s so reasonable-looking you’ll find it in textbooks, conference talks, and an awful lot of otherwise excellent Go code. We had …
Testing code that calls an LLM: yes, you actually can
“You can’t test code that calls an AI.” I’ve heard it said with great confidence, and it’s half right, which is the most dangerous kind of right. You genuinely can’t assert on what a non-deterministic model says. But the …
The AI provider that isn't an API
go-tool-base’s chat package puts five AI providers behind one interface. Four of them are exactly what you’d guess: HTTP calls to OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and anything OpenAI-compatible. The fifth one isn’t an API at all. …
