Methods¶

Most useful tricks never become projects. They sit in a script, solving one annoying problem well. This section pulls them out, one page each: the problem, why the approach works, a short sample, and where it stops working.

Each method has a small generic version with a test in the methods repository, under the MIT licence.

Method	What it solves
derive	Convert a file once, cache the text beside it, reuse until the source changes.
unit	Mark a folder with a `.unit` file, call it by name, move it anywhere and nothing breaks.
key	Hand a secret to one command's environment; never printed, typed or logged.
heartbeat	Wake an AI agent every N minutes; it remembers nothing, so the task folder remembers for it.
logtrim	Shrink a log the running program holds open: gzip it beside itself, empty it in place, no restart.
harvest	All the text in a folder in one file; quoted replies, signatures and copies appear once.
addguard	Refuse "stage everything" before an AI agent runs it, and tell it to name its files.
githooks	One hooks folder runs your checks in every repo, then each repo's own hook, so nothing breaks.
pwned	Check a password against known breaches by sending 5 characters of its hash, never the password.
deadrefs	List every dead path in your notes; rewrite one only when exactly one place could be its new home.
shrink	Recompress images in place and replace one only after both versions decode to identical pixels.
gate	Start a background job only while a number read from a command is under a limit; unknown never means go.
progress	One local page for every background job: wakes, commits, pictures, what is ready and what is next.
pyfix	Find Python packages with files missing or changed from the list pip keeps; reinstall them at the same version.
unshare	Give every hardlinked file its own file again, as a clone that costs no disk until edited.
remarks	Talk over a screen recording; get every remark with a still of the screen while you said it.
gitfix	Restore tracked files a cleanup tool deleted or hardlinked; leave moved files and your edits alone.
credit	Refuse a push that would publish a name you did not allow; old public history never blocks it.
agenthist	Put the commands your coding agent runs into your shell history, byte for byte as the shell writes it.
revive	Start the launch agents macOS skipped at login from one allowed agent; anything switched off stays off.
assetsignore	Keep `.DS_Store` off a Cloudflare Workers static site, written where the build cannot wipe it.
sift	Search the words inside every file under your folders in a fraction of a second; one SQLite file, rebuilds read only what changed.
recent	The files you actually opened, newest first: Spotlight's last-opened date, not what sync and builds wrote to.
wt	One git worktree per agent task, with the ignored `.env` files copied and dependencies installed, and a guarded merge back.
servers	Every TCP server on this machine, split into reachable-from-the-network and this-machine-only, with its folder; stop one or rebind it to 127.0.0.1.
redact	Swaps API keys, tokens, passwords and private keys for `[REDACTED:kind]` as text is logged; commit ids, checksums and variable names pass untouched.
phonehome	Lists what a document fetches from the network the moment it is opened: Office, OpenDocument, PDF (through compressed object streams), SVG, HTML.