An AI conversation is, fundamentally, its own history. The model’s next answer depends on everything said so far. And a CLI tool, by its very nature, forgets everything the moment it exits. Put those two facts together …
Most AI code generation works on a charming little principle I’ll call generate-and-hope. The model writes the code, the model stops at the closing brace, and whether the thing actually compiles is left as an exercise …
Ask an LLM a question and it hands you back prose. Lovely to read, miserable to program against. You wanted the one number buried in the middle of it, and now you’re writing a regular expression to fish a word out of …
Usage telemetry is genuinely useful. Knowing which commands people actually run, where the errors cluster, whether anyone ever touched the feature you spent a fortnight on… that’s the stuff that makes you a better …
An AI that can only produce text can describe your system. An AI that can call your Go functions can actually operate it. That gap, between describing and doing, is the difference between a chatbot and something …
Let me describe the actual lifecycle of a user meeting your CLI tool, because it’s a bit humbling. They run it. It doesn’t quite do what they expected. They run it again with --help. They get a wall of monospaced flag …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
