Tool Writing

Name: Tool Writing
Rating: 76
Author: usurobor

Standards for mechanical scripts in tools/.

When

•Task is mechanical
•No judgment required
•AI would burn tokens on clockwork

Principles

•Zero runtime deps (bash, git, coreutils, jq)
•NO_COLOR support
•Prereq checks (fail fast)
•Idempotent (safe to re-run)
•Machine-readable output
•set -euo pipefail

Template

bash

#!/bin/bash
# tool-name.sh — description
# Usage: ./tools/tool-name.sh [args]
# Exit: 0=success, 1=error, 2=no-op

set -euo pipefail

if [[ -n "${NO_COLOR:-}" ]]; then
  RED="" GREEN="" RESET=""
else
  RED='\033[0;31m' GREEN='\033[0;32m' RESET='\033[0m'
fi

check_prereqs() {
  command -v git &>/dev/null || { echo "Missing: git" >&2; exit 1; }
}

main() {
  check_prereqs
  # logic
  echo -e "${GREEN}✓${RESET} Done"
}

main "$@"

Exit Codes

Code	Meaning
0	Success
1	Error
2	No-op (already done)