--output json worked everywhere. On the top-level command, on every ordinary subcommand, wherever the user fancied putting it. Then it stopped working in exactly one place, and of course it was the subcommand I’d been …
I ended the last post promising to show how a Rust command registers itself when the language flatly refuses to run any of your code before main(). This is that post, and it’s a lovely example of reaching the same …
I built go-tool-base because I was sick of rebuilding the same CLI scaffolding every time I started a new Go tool. You’d think that would have taught me a lesson about doing things more than once. Apparently not, because …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Here’s a question that sounds trivial and really isn’t: where, exactly, does a CLI tool’s structure live? Not the logic of each command… the structure. Which commands exist, what they’re called, which flags they take, …
“Make it work with AI” has become one of those requests that lands on a developer’s desk with a thud and not much further detail attached. My instinct, the first time, was to brace for a big lump of integration work… a …
If you’ve written more than two or three command-line tools in Go, you’ll recognise the shape of the first afternoon. I certainly do! You reach for Cobra for the command tree, Viper for config, and then you start the …
