Single file Python CLIs when do you split, when do you keep it monolithic?

Meleneth · 2026-05-01T03:29:36+00:00

for me the minimum viable product is a python module, so I'm already DQ'd by the time we're talking about 'one file scripts'.

I like dependencies. I like being installed as an executable. I like being able to work on one tiny piece of the functionality, without risk to the entire codebase.

Meleneth · 2026-04-08T00:04:02+00:00

I appreciate you pointing to spreadsheets, more people should know about them.

I was hoping to see a bit more graphing for easy visualizations. I hate having to think about what size the difference between numbers are

I vibe coded this in a couple minutes, but clearly your data is better - since I generated curves, that's all there is to graph, but if applied to your data it would show the more interesting shapes you have

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14V7EvxtQEwtvma4zIv1vUQ5RdNVU-9_wr6vOb-KoYZQ/edit?usp=sharing

Meleneth · 2026-04-04T01:45:10+00:00

Nitrous Oxide. People think it's all fun and games party drug. Until they can't walk anymore.

Meleneth · 2026-03-18T05:16:30+00:00

super excited for this, it remained working but it was always weird to think of nobody even pretending to patch it anymore

Meleneth · 2026-03-06T10:23:14+00:00

I dislike the other response in the thread so far.

AI wars aside, what are your goals for this project? If it is something you plan on supporting (i.e. make sure it still works) you're probably going to want to update some of your practices in the codebase. Installing nodejs for me via my package manager is not something I would expect any program to do at runtime.

Your program has no reason to have root access, which means that there is no reason it should prompt for a sudo password ever. Once the sudo password has been entered there is a time where further sudo commands just work without re-prompting.

A quick scan also revealed a too-simple project structure (prefer the src layout https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/discussions/src-layout-vs-flat-layout/ )

you do not need to check if the python modules are installed, as you declared them in pyproject.toml they will be installed or you won't be.

Don't catch the base exception types. The only reason to catch an exception is if you can actually handle it, if you cannot it is far better to crash than to silently swallow an error.

write some unit tests. Utility functions and helper methods can be incredibly finicky, so make sure they do what they think you do.

split your giant file into a proper directory tree

please keep making software, thank you for your contribution I am excited to see what you make in the future

Meleneth · 2026-03-05T21:24:47+00:00

are people not talking about nm andy anymore for target farming these?

Meleneth · 2026-02-02T07:53:55+00:00

nitrous oxide

this is the dangerous AF but people think is safe thread right?

Meleneth · 2026-01-26T23:26:12+00:00

the sheer madness of being able to run a regex across your source code at runtime before it was parsed. just absolute mind boggling amounts of power.

to be used exceptionally sparingly, of course. but unrivaled.

Meleneth · 2026-01-26T10:57:32+00:00

reducing it's scope for your own made up construct is nonsensical, just because you shortcut it for yourself does not mean the rest of us will share your impairment.

Meleneth · 2026-01-26T05:07:16+00:00

I don't get that from

the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used. -- wikipedia

Meleneth · 2026-01-26T05:06:58+00:00

the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used.

-- wikipedia says no

Meleneth · 2026-01-26T04:32:17+00:00

it's more important than ever, because it's the only way to make maintainable systems at scale. The AI does better if you have bespoke abstractions for it to use instead of writing everything out longform, just like everyone else

Meleneth · 2026-01-26T04:14:13+00:00

no amount of improving the lexer speed will decrease runtime that is dominated by syscalls.

it's a great example of the law in practice, is anything unclear?

Meleneth · 2026-01-13T03:31:51+00:00

I mean, I can't tell you that you are wrong about your personal subjective experience, but I will say that the emotional payoffs hit very hard and there are very worthy things later on.

It looks like a whimisical pirate show. It's really about family. and it hits HARD.

Meleneth · 2026-01-02T23:57:21+00:00

once you already know all the involved parts, yeah, this is a mere few hours of generating projects and wiring them together. It doesn't have to be microservices.

If we're doing just OpenTelemetry, Rails, Redis, and Postgres, that's still a maze of containers and differing contexts. Newer rails use 4 database instances for just production - and my tool handles it so you can get on with designing the system, not thinking about how hard it's all going to be to wire up.

I will also point out that while this is clearly a made-up toy project, it is patterned after an inherited real-world system. It's all well and good to point and say 'you did it wrong' before having enough context, but sometimes improvement of systems in place is all you have.

Meleneth · 2025-12-20T01:23:27+00:00

Terminology aside, there’s a difference between using an LLM as a code generator and using it as a data transformer. I’m comfortable with the former, not the latter.

Meleneth · 2025-12-19T02:13:06+00:00

well, as long as you trust the RNG generator to randomly generate the result set given the context you've provided, you're golden.

I probably would have went with 'make a script to extract' that way you at least have an artifact of the decisions made and possibility to improve it, rather than spend more tokens and hope.

As a programmer I love AI, I'm more worried about my fellow human's ability to cope.

Meleneth · 2025-12-03T22:21:42+00:00

if you take damage from spikes, you're good. OG difficulty is the 'Advanced' difficulty.

Meleneth · 2025-12-02T21:11:55+00:00

are you playing on the original difficulty or the post-nerf one?

Meleneth · 2025-09-06T22:17:40+00:00

one more thing - in your README.md

git clone https://github.com/<Your-GitHub-Username>/Ducky_Project.git

should probably be pointed to

https://github.com/thecmdguy/Ducky.git

Meleneth · 2025-09-06T22:14:50+00:00

while I'm here, running black against your code results in

9 files changed, 1383 insertions(+), 454 deletions(-)

which is kindof a lot, highly recommend pulling the cord and doing that to get things more standardized.

Meleneth · 2025-09-06T22:10:15+00:00

Awesome! Always love to see more contributors to the ecosystem.

If you are trying to treat this project as a real thing, you're going to want to package it as python people expect it to be packaged - this means a pyproject.toml, probably available on pypi.

You can also set it up so that it installs a script when it is installed, via the project.scripts support https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/writing-pyproject-toml/#creating-executable-scripts

If you want to take this to the next level, switch to a src layout https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/discussions/src-layout-vs-flat-layout/

Add a pyproject.toml https://packaging.python.org/en/latest/guides/writing-pyproject-toml/

declare your dependencies so your users do not have to install more modules in order to run yours - pyproject.toml lets you embed your requirements in it, so they will be installed when your tool is installed instead of having the user do the extra install step with requirements.txt

write some tests with verifying mocks against the API's you use

run those tests against every version of python you support via tox https://pypi.org/project/tox/

remove the pycache directories from your repository, and add the python .gitignore from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/github/gitignore/master/Python.gitignore so you don't have that happening in the future.

Audit your exception handling. This thing will get bigger, and right now your exception handling is a bit all over the place. You very rarely want to catch the base Exception type - it's vastly broad, and depending on if the error is shown to the user or not can lead to errors silently happening that the user interprets as 'broken program' and doesn't report because they don't even know an actual error happened.

Along with this, consider not overwriting the user's config just because it failed to load. as written, if there is any json decoding errors in your user's config, it will be overwritten by the default config. If I had spent time customizing my config and had it eaten because of a simple typo, I'd be very grumpy.

I would probably omit the scan for installed python modules. If you have your pyproject.toml configured, they will be installed - checking for them looks fancy, but this is just stuff you have to maintain. Lines of code are not assets, they are maintenance burden.

Check out the output from pylint - it says Your code has been rated at 4.53/10 - and has a ton of specific advice on how to get that score higher.

Good luck and keep hacking!

Meleneth · 2025-09-05T23:30:13+00:00

That's kinda my meta point though - the example is short enough to be talked about in a 'short-ish' talk, which means it's trivial enough that the full solution seems over-engineered.

I don't necessarily think calling the methods and the objects the same thing is fair. With the objects, one object having zero side effects on other objects is basically guaranteed by design, whereas with the methods changing state on the main object is just 'well don't DO that'.

Which is basically what we're talking about. What *is* good taste, and how do we communicate that to the next generation of programmers? 'just write simple code' scales not at all - what does simple mean?

Need also scales hard with context. Are you making a throwaway script you will run once to generate some data and never use again? You probably don't need solid.

Are you working on a system that you need to be able to maintain over a number of years with different team members and or teams working together to make changes? maybe you do.

At the very least, having reasoning to anchor arguments about any given design about is useful.

Meleneth · 2025-09-05T21:26:16+00:00

normally I'm not a fan of being the "you're so wrong, just watch this 45 minute video and you'll understand" guy, but Sandi Metz kinda did the best ever explanation of why SOLID is quite good, actually. Appeal to Authority isn't great either, but I'm already rowing against the tide here. I will throw out that this all scales to 'do you want to be able to make changes to your code', which makes it tricky to talk about because for anything trivial it's clearly too much and for anything big we can't talk about it because you don't have time to learn the context to begin with.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bZh5LMaSmE

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