Tools

A surprising amount of debugging boils down to “let me check the database.” Schema lookups, sample row counts, “is this index actually being used,” EXPLAIN plans. None of that is hard to do in psql, but pulling Claude Code into the loop means copy-pasting schemas and query results back and forth, which gets old.

postgresql-mcp is an MCP server that gives Claude Code direct, read-only access to PostgreSQL. Claude does the inspection, you keep the conversation flowing.

I maintain a Go library for the Perplexity API (perplexity-go). Once it existed, it was almost a sin not to wrap it in a CLI. So pplx is what I reach for when I want a cited, web-aware answer from the shell — and now also a Model Context Protocol server I plug into Claude Code.

There’s a category of bash one-liners I keep rewriting: “run this thing, and if it fails, try again a few times with a delay.” curl against a service that’s still booting. A kubectl rollout status that flickers. A flaky integration test. A docker pull from a registry having a bad five seconds.

You can write the loop yourself in five lines of bash. I’ve done it hundreds of times. But I always forget the exit code handling, the sleep arithmetic, the cap on retries. So I wrote retry — a single binary that does exactly this, with proper exponential backoff if you want it.

The AWS console is great until you want to give someone a read-only link to a single bucket. Then it’s terrible: you have to mint an IAM user or a federated role, walk them through the console, scope it down, deal with their MFA, and so on. All they wanted was to browse a folder.

s3xplorer started as a weekend POC to play with the AWS Go SDK v2 and the minio client, and turned into the tool I now use to expose a bucket to humans without giving them AWS credentials.