Telemetry that asks first
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 …
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26 pages
Go
Letting the AI call your Go functions
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 …
Nobody reads the manual
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 …
BDD where it earns its place, and nowhere else
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 …
An AI interface that fits on one screen
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 …
Half your users don't have eyes
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 …
Lifecycle management for when your CLI grows up into a service
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 …
Middleware for CLI commands, not just web servers
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 …
A logging interface that doesn't leak its backend
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 …
Errors that tell the user what to do next
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 …
