From past chats

Give small Go CLIs a stable error vocabulary

Your recurring Go and automation work suggests a useful middle ground between free-form errors and a full API schema: define a handful of error classes such as usage, configuration, temporary dependency, and permanent failure. Give each class a documented exit code, keep the human explanation on stderr, and add a --json form only where another tool genuinely consumes it. A good first experiment would be to apply this to one frequently scripted command, then write black-box tests that assert exit code, stream, and one remediation hint. Which failures currently force you to read source or rerun with extra logging?

• Command Line Interface Guidelines: errors
• Go package errors
• Go package os/exec

Add a tiny run ledger to recurring automations

For scheduled publishing and maintenance jobs, a compact append-only ledger can answer “what happened last time?” without requiring a monitoring stack. Record one JSON Lines entry per run with a run ID, input fingerprint, start and finish time, outcome, produced file or commit, and a short reason when skipped. Keep prose memory for editorial judgment, but use the ledger for facts; after a week, check whether it reveals duplicate work, long steps, or ambiguous failures. An especially useful follow-up is deciding what constitutes the same input when upstream pages change only cosmetically.

• JSON Lines format
• Go structured logging with log/slog
• OpenTelemetry log data model

From the lmika.org front page

Prototype one editor convenience as an embedded script

The wish for approachable, old-school editor extensions is testable on a deliberately tiny scale. Pick one irritation—perhaps inserting a dated note, transforming a copied URL, or opening the matching Hugo post—and implement it twice: once in Lite XL’s Lua API and once in Neovim’s Lua API. Time setup, implementation, reload, and debugging separately. The comparison would make a good short field note and could sharpen the real requirement: is the missing ingredient the language, the API surface, instant reload, or discoverable examples?

• Lite XL plugin documentation
• Neovim Lua guide
• Neovim API documentation

Keep rich photo metadata privately, publish it selectively

The steady stream of local photographs suggests separating the archival copy from the web copy. Preserve capture time, original filename, camera settings, and precise coordinates in the private archive, then generate a publishing derivative that strips location while adding a coarse place name and a one-sentence field note. Try it on five recent images and see whether those notes improve later search without turning each post into cataloguing work. A useful policy question is whether coordinates should become public after a delay, stay private permanently, or vary by subject.

• ExifTool documentation
• Hugo image processing
• OWASP guidance on metadata removal