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 genuinely useful, and …
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 descriptions, skim it, …
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 paragraph of ceremonial …
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 hiring a removals firm …
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 it wrong, and not one …
I had a constructor I was rather pleased with. Hand go-tool-base’s root command its props and as many sub-commands as you like, and off it goes. Then I needed to thread some config file paths through it, reached for the obvious “just add a …
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 aren’t people at …
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 scheduler, so it grows a …
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 instead of a …
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 container wants none of …
go-tool-base
Pioneering
