Poiesic Systems

There’s a new discipline coming to software engineering. I’m calling it forensic refactoring: the practice of reverse-engineering intent from code that never had any.

The last two years have been hard. The kind of hard that makes you want to demand to speak with life’s manager so you can punch them in the throat. I’m not going to catalog the specifics because this isn’t that kind of post and you’re not my therapist. But 2024 and 2025 tested me in ways I wasn’t prepared for. There were times where I wasn’t sure that I’d be equal to the challenge.

In the few hours a day I’m not spending on building Collabchek I’ve been hacking on a personal AI chat client. I’ve used several and the one that’s come closest to what I want has been sigogden’s very cool aichat project which I encourage you to check out. I’ve liberally borrowed several good ideas from their code.

As I’ve explored I’ve come to realize my requirements are somewhat unique.

Here’s a quick hack I came up with while experimenting with git worktrees and multiple coding agents and dealing with pod naming collisions when bringing up multiple copies of my local dev stack.

tl;dr Install these tools

Here’s the priority order for maximum impact:

1. ripgrep, fd, gh - These transform search and git workflows
2. golangci-lint, goimports, gotests - Go development gets SO much smoother
3. gofumpt, staticcheck - Polish that code to a shine
4. jq, bat, fzf - Quality of life improvements you didn’t know you needed

Claude will use these if installed. Since most/all are much faster than the built-in tools they replace it’s a clear win.