Tools

Your Go CLI tool is on GitHub Releases. 80% of developers will never find it there. Here’s how to put it on pip and npm with 50 lines of bash, getting a 12x download multiplier. Full technique with scripts, numbers, and the release pipeline that ties it together.

Rigorous benchmark of AI agent code retrieval: 107 tasks, 5 repos, 5 languages, 4 competitors. grep precision: 2%. GitNexus: 7.6%. knowing: 23% (11.5x better, p<0.0001). Plus: 193x faster indexing, 28x less RAM, 48x more token-efficient than Repomix. The first statistically validated comparison of code intelligence tools for AI agents.

We built a reproducible experiment measuring how many tokens AI coding agents consume when navigating code with grep vs LSP. On HashiCorp Consul (319K lines), LSP uses 34x fewer tokens. On a TypeScript rename across 24 files: 1,441x fewer bytes. The experiment covers 4 codebases, 3 languages, 13 tasks covering 7 agent workflows.

MCP servers are the tools AI agents rely on. We tested 55 of them with mcp-assert, found 20 bugs across 9 servers, and submitted fix PRs. Grafana and Ant Group merged ours. Three days after launch, Ant Group’s visualization team asked us to integrate mcp-assert into their CI. The most common failure: servers throw unhandled exceptions instead of returning isError, leaving agents unable to recover.

I needed AI agents to reliably rename symbols, find references, and check diagnostics without silent failures. The existing MCP-LSP tools were stateless, feature-poor, and untested. So I built agent-lsp: a persistent runtime with 50 tools, 20 provider-agnostic skills, speculative execution, and an audit trail for every AI-driven edit.

The Scaffold Agent doesn’t add capability. It restores a review gate that was cosmetically present but structurally absent. The worktree isolation trip wire catches failures that were invisible until merge time. Neither fixes a bug in the traditional sense. Both fix trust.

Scout-and-wave v0.1.0 worked. Then we ran it on documentation agents, measured the overhead honestly, and learned that raw agent count is a bad proxy for when parallelism is worth it. This post covers the audit-fix-audit loop, the dogfooding experiment that confirmed SAW was 88% slower than sequential for that job, SAW Quick mode for small disjoint work, and the bootstrap problem for new projects.

The scout refused to write the IMPL doc. Forty-five percent of agents arrived at work already done. The skill file grew to 400 lines with no separation of concerns. Each failure drove a specific fix — and each fix is traceable to an exact incident in an exact run. This is the scout prompt’s bug tracker.

Naive parallel agents step on each other. The scout-and-wave pattern solves this by front-loading dependency mapping: one throwaway agent identifies seams and builds a living coordination artifact before any implementation begins. Development then proceeds in waves, each consuming and updating the artifact for the next.

Most CLI tools ship with no visual identity beyond a help screen. Here’s how I used AI image generation to create Shelby, a consistent mascot with a locked-down spec, and built a complete brand system - poses, screencasts, color palette, terminal theme - for shelfctl in 4 days.

Every PDF committed to git history stays there forever, bloating clones even after deletion. Git LFS adds cost and friction. GitHub Release assets offer a better approach: free CDN-backed storage with on-demand downloads, lightweight repos, and built-in migration tools.