A single zsh function for one-line AI answers that knows when to pre-type the command
Asking a chat UI for a one-line command is too much friction. A 15-line zsh function and a `print -z` trick fix it, with one oh-my-zsh footgun along the…
Today I learned
Notes from the workbench.
Short entries. The kind of thing you scribble on the back of a receipt before you forget — a flag that finally made sense, a one-liner that saved an hour, a footgun that drew blood.
All notes
Blocking AI crawlers is the new 'noindex'
Blocking GPTBot, Anthropic, and Perplexity trades long-term search reach for short-term control. The math on whether it's worth it for your site.
Delivery impersonation: the social engineering vector that just works
Someone called pretending to deliver a Diwali bakery hamper. They got my full address in 20 seconds. Why this pretext works and what to ask back.
JA4's split format saved our metrics cardinality
Rotating ciphers exploded our TLS client metrics to 50k unique fingerprints. JA4's split format dropped that to under 200 without losing detection.
Git interactive rebase: clean up your commit history
Turn five 'fix typo' commits into one before the review notices. git rebase -i, the rules for when not to use it, and the aliases I keep around.
Bash parameter expansion: string manipulation without sed and awk
Bash has built-in string manipulation that's faster than spawning sed or awk. The patterns that replaced 80% of my pipeline calls, with a cheat sheet.
Docker volume debugging: finding where your data actually lives
Volume mounts that look right but won't persist data. The five-command inspection sequence that always tells me which mount is actually being read.
kubectl JSONPath: extract exactly what you need
kubectl can return exactly the field you want without a grep-awk-sed pipeline. JSONPath queries that replaced my entire stash of one-liners.
kubectl neat: remove Kubernetes YAML clutter
kubectl get -o yaml dumps 200 lines of generated noise. kubectl neat strips it down to what you actually wrote. Two commands, no more copy-paste cleanup.
jq: the command-line JSON parser that earns its keep
jq is sed for JSON. The patterns I use weekly — filtering, transforming, grouping — and the one-liner that replaced every Python parsing script I had.
Docker build cache: the .dockerignore gotcha
Docker builds slow despite a clean layer order? Your .dockerignore is probably letting files bust the cache on every commit. The two-line fix.