#cli
Agentic Software Factory, In Action
In this post I show you my agentic setup consisting of three repos, one of which is a completely self-contained software factory. It defines agents that complete specs, write plans, break them down into frontend and backend work, then pass it onto the agents specializing in that type of development, who are working concurrently and communicating between each other through a 'mailbox' mechanism. Once they are done, pull requests are submitted and another adversarial agent performs a PR review. Only after addressing the feedback, going green on CI, do the PRs become ready for merge and for human evaluation. I did this deliberately, but sooner or later the majority of PRs will auto-merge and auto-deploy.
How I built three dry-cli extensions, then the forum's AI bot thought I was a spammer
Three Ruby CLI annoyances became three gems. Then my announcement got caught by a spam filter, and a conversation I didn't expect followed. If you write CLI utilities, especially in Ruby, and in particular using dry-cli framework, you'll want to read this. Pinky promise.
The silent genius of the DNS protocol — the story of my life.
Hundreds of companies sell DNS, yet almost none can import another provider's export, even though the standard interchange format has existed since the eighties: the zone file. The 1.0 rewrite of my dnsmadeeasy Ruby gem finally embraces it, Terraform-style: export, edit, plan, apply. Includes a live demo on this blog's own domain, and the story of thirty years that led here.
Deterministic Meets Probabilistic: How I Solved Forms by Writing Four Ruby Gems and Made my Wife Happy
Famous last words: 'How hard can a small intake form be?' Several months and four interconnected open-source gems later, I have achieved peak engineering enlightenment. Here is how Inquirex turns messy free-text into deterministic, typed graph states.
How I Shipped a Swift CLI in an Hour, with Tests & CI. My First Ever Swift.
Mermaid exports SVGs that OmniGraffle imports as a diagram of empty boxes. In under an hour I diagnosed why (their SVGs are built for browsers, not native apps) and shipped svg2og — a working Swift CLI — despite never having written a line of Swift in my life. A short story about what the age of AI actually changes.
Sopsy: Secrets in Git, Sealed by the Secure Enclave
A small Rust CLI that lets your team commit encrypted secrets straight into git, with the private key locked inside your Mac's Secure Enclave and released only by your fingerprint. Here's what it does, the excellent little bugs I stepped on getting there, and why I think it is a genuinely nice way to run secrets on a team.
How to Write Awesome CLI tools in Ruby and test them with RSpec and Aruba
This post details how to use dry-cli gem to create multi-command and sub-command CLI tools, and how to test them using RSpec and Aruba.
Dead Simple Encryption with Sym
Most of us are familiar with the concept of application secrets, how important it is is not to commit those to your version control system, and how challenging it is to distribute development and production secrets across the dev team in a consistent and, most importantly, secure fashion. In this post we introduce a new Ruby Gem called 'Sym' for symmetric encryption.