The day a script needs changing everywhere
Eleven variants of one shell script, on hundreds of laptops, launching pods into production. The language was never the problem, and it wasn't the fix either.
Categories
78 pages
go-tool-base
The underpinnings for any Go command-line tool, and (as a few of my projects now prove) for comprehensive web services too. It standardises the boilerplate and wiring you end up writing in every Go project, and puts config, logging, self-update, a DI container and the rest straight at your fingertips. Highly opinionated, and it makes some calls people will disagree with, but it works, and it works really well. The CLI it ships with is a big part of that: keeping a Go app built, updated and maintained becomes almost trivial.
Config is a border, not a chain
I built a boundary so I wouldn't have to move my config package. Then I moved it anyway, and the boundary is the only reason that didn't hurt.
An agent is a loop with real tools and a fence
An agent is a model in a loop with tools it can really call and results it can really see. Taking the ReAct pattern apart in go-tool-base.
Publish your key where the platform can't touch it
If the platform hosting your code also hands out the key that verifies it, the signature proves nothing. Where to publish a public key instead.
The framework doesn't know where your signing key lives
Where a signing key lives is the most provider-specific decision in the whole business, so the framework deliberately refuses to have an opinion.
The gateway that split my trace in two
Wiring OTel-native observability through a gRPC service with a REST gateway, and discovering the gateway had split a single trace into two.
The gpg command that hung (so I built signing into the tool)
A gpg call that hung and never returned, and why release signing ended up built into the Go tool itself rather than shelled out to the gpg binary.
Which CLI library should you start with?
Choosing a CLI library in Go and Rust. Go is a ladder you climb from the standard library; Rust asks a different question much earlier.
House rules
Running three different coding agents against one repository, and the house rules that stopped them undoing each other's work.
The secret that wasn't on my branch
A secret scanner failed a merge request over a test key and a documentation PEM that the change did not contain. Scoping a scan properly.
