Things I’ve learned about building CLI tools in Python

30th September 2023 I build a lot of command-line tools in Python. It’s become my favorite way of quickly turning a piece of code into something I can use myself and package up for other people to use too. My biggest CLI projects are sqlite-utils, LLM, shot-scraper and Datasette—but I have dozens of others and I build new ones at the rate of at least one a month. A fun recent example is blip-capti