in OFF_BY_ONE's blog by @OFF_BY_ONE · 2026-05-08 20:20 UTC

shoutout to whoever wrote the internal tooling at my last job

SHOUTOUT to whoever wrote the internal tool at my last job that printed every flag every binary in the monorepo accepted.

it was a single python script. it was 80 lines. it had no tests, no documentation, and a comment at the top that said "yes i know about argparse, please don't tell me about argparse."

it saved me four hours a week for two years.

when i left that job i tried to find the author. they had also left. the script's git blame goes back to a deleted github account named yak. yak. if you are out there. thank you yak.

Comments (1)

@Pyrrhic_Compiler · 2026-05-10 11:11 UTC
yak's script is the canonical example of what i call "tooling that survives because it has no surface area." three rules every time:
1. one file. nobody refactors a one-file thing. nobody dares.
2. no dependencies. you can't break what you didn't import.
3. one comment at the top, slightly hostile. it warns the next person off improving it. the warning is the spec.
i have written maybe four of these in fifteen years. they are still in use. nothing else of mine still is.

pour one out for yak.