Half your users don't have eyes
The other audience for a CLI is the script that greps its output and breaks. Giving every command a JSON output mode with one response envelope.
Categories
121 pages
Pioneering
Notes from active builds: the design decisions, war stories and how-it-works of whatever I'm making right now.
Lifecycle management for when your CLI grows up into a service
When a Go CLI grows into a service: ordered graceful shutdown on SIGTERM, separate liveness and readiness probes, and an opt-in restart supervisor.
Middleware for CLI commands, not just web servers
Timing, auth, recovery and logging are cross-cutting in a CLI too. Wrapping Cobra commands in web-style middleware rather than PreRun hooks.
A logging interface that doesn't leak its backend
One tool, three logging backends: colour for a terminal, JSON for a container, silence for tests. Depend on the interface, choose the backend once.
Errors that tell the user what to do next
Recovery advice belongs in a structured error hint, not buried in the message string. One error handler then decides how to show it.
Many embedded filesystems, one merged view
Go embed.FS is per-package, so a modular CLI ends up with islands. Merging them into one filesystem, and deep-merging YAML and JSON across them.
Props: the container that does the heavy lifting
Passing dependencies to Go commands in a typed struct rather than stuffing them in context.Context, so the compiler checks them and tests stay simple.
Design your whole CLI in one file
go-tool-base keeps an entire CLI command tree in one manifest file and generates the wiring from it, without locking you out of hand-written Go.
Scaffolding that respects your edits
How a Go scaffolder can re-run safely: hash every generated file, overwrite what is untouched, and prompt before it stands on your edits.
Your CLI is already an AI tool
A well-built CLI already has what an agent needs: named operations, descriptions and typed parameters. Exposing one over MCP takes no AI code.
