CLI

Five releases landed while I was writing the last two posts. The one that matters: PixelLab can now edit an existing asset directly, no ComfyUI instance required. Two new generators and a gallery shortcut came along with it.

The Pixelkiln project page said one provider, no characters. Forty-eight releases later, in about three weeks, both claims are wrong, and here’s what actually shipped.

Pixelkiln ships a second set of instructions now, not for you, for whatever’s driving the CLI on your behalf. Here’s what it won’t let an agent do, and where else it lives.

A single 65-badge icon set turned into 350 disconnected objects with no record of what shipped from where. Here’s the lockfile we built to fix that, and the three bugs we found the day we actually put it to the test.

A Sunday backlog on coco that should have eaten the whole day took about an hour. Not because the AI wrote my code, but because steering files and specs meant it already knew the project instead of me re-explaining it every session. Here is what is in mine, and what I left out.

Every guide blames a fancy zsh prompt when your AI coding agent cannot read the terminal. So I deleted mine, then deleted bash too, and the commands still were not running. Here is where the trail actually led.

I rebuilt coco’s interface with a TUI design skill, then needed to show it off. Screenshots and demo GIFs turned out to be their own craft, full of subtle traps. So I built a skill for that too.

The regex-based structural diff extractors landed and worked – then hit a ceiling regex was never going to clear. Here’s how coco’s diff pipeline actually moved onto tree-sitter: sharper structural context for commit messages, a layered regex fallback, lazy-loaded grammars – plus the bonus the same parser bought us, syntax-highlighted diffs in the Workstation.

I got one of those “your key is expiring” emails from Humble Bundle, opened my library, and realized I had no idea how many unclaimed games were sitting there. So I wrote a tool. What followed was a crash course in everything Playwright throws at you when you’re automating a real, bot-averse, React-rendered storefront.

localpress is a CLI tool that processes your WordPress media library locally – compression, WebP/AVIF conversion, AI background removal, and round-trip desktop editing – with no cloud SaaS, no recurring credits, and no plugin required on the WordPress side.

Doorman 2.0 ships Cloudflare WAF support alongside Vercel Firewall, a new .doorman.json config format, and 1,100+ tests backing a production-ready multi-provider firewall CLI.

A look at everything that’s landed in ink-enhanced-select-input on the road to 1.0: a headless hook for custom renderers, multi-select mode, inline search, item groups, scroll indicators, Escape/cancel support, and 133 tests – including a real bug caught by writing edge-case tests for backspace handling in searchable mode.

After years of building terminal apps and a growing inability to justify my GitKraken subscription, I built a Claude Skill for TUI design. Here’s what’s in it, why I made it, and what I’m planning to build with it next.

A client needed help managing a few VPSes, so I wrote a small bash script. Three rewrites and 21 releases later, it’s Strut: an open-source CLI for deploying Docker stacks anywhere there’s SSH, built agent-first for the way I actually code now.

Hitting OpenAI’s 1MB / 30-operation cap on Custom GPT actions when your real API has 150+ endpoints is maddening. Spec Shaver is the CLI I built to reduce a bloated OpenAPI spec down to the operations that actually matter, while keeping the schema valid.

Fargo Flags is the feature-flag toolkit I wished existed for Next.js: zero infrastructure, type-safe, and small enough to drop into any project. Here’s the design call that shaped it and the trade-off I’m still not sure about.

I built Vercel Doorman because clicking through firewall rules in a dashboard is the kind of thing infrastructure-as-code was supposed to fix. This is what it does, why JSON config beat a DSL, and what I’d change if I started over.

Coco is the AI-powered Git assistant I built because I was tired of writing terrible commit messages at 11pm. The story of how it grew from a one-off script into something I now use daily across every project.

You know those moments during vacation when you should be relaxing, but the creative coding brain just won’t shut off? That was me last week, sitting in an Airbnb with my laptop, a decent WiFi connection, and way too much coffee. The goal? Create my own version of the iconic Matrix digital rain effect – […]

Notes from making tFrogger feel like an arcade classic in a terminal: tuning movement to feel responsive without breaking the per-cell grid, and the legacy config-folder cleanup I should have done sooner.

Explore the joys of building terminal-based card games with a dive into my journey of recreating the classic Memory/Concentration card game using the ink-playing-cards library.

Create a terminal-based Blackjack game with React, TypeScript, and the `ink-playing-cards` card library for a nostalgic yet modern gaming experience.

Upgrade your ink-select-input for seamless vertical and horizontal layouts enabling more intuitive and space-efficient interfaces in your Ink CLI apps

Effortlessly clean up your WordPress XML export by removing comment bloat using a simple SED command on OSX

PixelLab’s Object Creator sat on the project’s own roadmap since the character generator shipped. Two releases now cover it: a new objectPro generator for skeleton-free props and creatures, and gallery buttons that add a new pose or animation without touching the manifest by hand.