“Why is there a mutex around a boolean that only ever gets set once?” It’s a fair question, and I’d half-asked it of myself before someone asked it of me. The answer turns out to be written, in as many words, in a code …
I’m going to tell you about a bug go-tool-base shipped, because it’s one of those bugs that’s so reasonable-looking you’ll find it in textbooks, conference talks, and an awful lot of otherwise excellent Go code. We had …
I turned OpenSSF Scorecard on expecting a pat on the head. go-tool-base is a security-minded project, I’m careful, surely the robot would agree. The robot did not agree. It handed back a report card with a fair bit of …
“You can’t test code that calls an AI.” I’ve heard it said with great confidence, and it’s half right, which is the most dangerous kind of right. You genuinely can’t assert on what a non-deterministic model says. But the …
go-tool-base’s chat package puts five AI providers behind one interface. Four of them are exactly what you’d guess: HTTP calls to OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and anything OpenAI-compatible. The fifth one isn’t an API at all. …
An AI conversation is, fundamentally, its own history. The model’s next answer depends on everything said so far. And a CLI tool, by its very nature, forgets everything the moment it exits. Put those two facts together …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
