Way back in the introduction I promised I’d come back to the self-update integrity checks. Here we are. And the starting point is a slightly uncomfortable admission: for a good long while, go-tool-base’s update command …
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 …
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 …
“Let users point at their own AI endpoint” is one of those config options that looks completely harmless on the way in. People want it, for perfectly good reasons. Then you sit with it for a minute and realise you’ve …
Dammit! How did that get there? A log line that should never have existed. Not a password I’d carelessly printed, nothing as obvious as that. An upstream API handed me back an error, and it had quoted my own bearer token …
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 …
“Why is there a mutex around a boolean that only ever gets set once?” It’s a fair question, and I’d half-asked it of myself before someone asked it of me. The answer turns out to be written, in as many words, in a code …
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 …
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 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 …
