Most AI code generation works on a charming little principle I’ll call generate-and-hope. The model writes the code, the model stops at the closing brace, and whether the thing actually compiles is left as an exercise for you. For a snippet …
Ask an LLM a question and it hands you back prose. Lovely to read, miserable to program against. You wanted the one number buried in the middle of it, and now you’re writing a regular expression to fish a word out of three well-written …
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 maintainer. Wanting it is …
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 …
