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Scripts I wrote that I use all the time

(evanhahn.com)
768 points speckx | 9 comments | 22 Oct 25 14:53 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source | bottom
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soiltype ◴[22 Oct 25 17:59 UTC] No.45672833[source]▶
This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm most interested in finding on HN. How do other developers work, and how can I get better at my work from it?

What's always interesting to me is how many of these I'll see and initially think, "I don't really need that." Because I'm well aware of the effect (which I'm sure has a name - I suppose it's similar to induced demand) of "make $uncommon_task much cheaper" -> "$uncommon_task becomes the basis of an entirely new workflow/skill". So I'm going to try out most of them and see what sticks!

Also: really love the style of the post. It's very clear but also includes super valuable information about how often the author actually uses each script, to get a sense ahead of time for which ones are more likely to trigger the effect described above.

A final aside about my own workflows which betrays my origins... for some of these operations and for others i occasionally need, I'll just open a browser dev tools window and use JS to do it, for example lowercasing a string :)

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1. chipsrafferty ◴[22 Oct 25 18:42 UTC] No.45673383[source]▶
I'd love to see a cost benefit analysis of the author's approach vs yours, which includes the time it took the author to create the scripts, remember/learn to use them/reference them when forgetting syntax, plus time spent migrating whenever changing systems.
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2. te_cima ◴[22 Oct 25 19:00 UTC] No.45673616[source]▶
why is this interesting to you? the whole point of doing all of this is to be more efficient in the long run. of course there is an initial setup cost and learning curve after which you will hopefully feel quite efficient with your development environment. you are making it sound like it is not worth the effort because you have to potentially spend time learning "it"? i do not believe that it takes long to "learning" it, but of course it can differ a lot from person to person. your remarks seem like non-issues to me.
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3. akersten ◴[22 Oct 25 19:04 UTC] No.45673661[source]▶
It's interesting because there's a significant chance one wastes more time tinkering around with custom scripts than saving in the long run. See https://xkcd.com/1205/

For example. The "saves 5 seconds task that I do once a month" from the blog post. Hopefully the author did not spend more than 5 minutes writing said script and maintaining it, or they're losing time in the long run.

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4. kelvinjps10 ◴[22 Oct 25 19:38 UTC] No.45674114{3}[source]▶
I find that now with AI, you can make scripts very quickly, reducing the time to write them by a lot. There is still some time needed for prompting and testing but still.
5. karczex ◴[22 Oct 25 21:21 UTC] No.45675300[source]▶
Sometimes it's rather matter of sanity than time management. I once created systemd service which goes to company web page and downloads some files which I sometimes need. This script was pretty hacky, and writing it took me a lot of time - probably more than clicking manually on this page in the long run. But clicking it so annoying, that I feel it was totally worth.
6. taejavu ◴[22 Oct 25 21:55 UTC] No.45675648[source]▶
Not all time is created equal. I’ll happily invest more time than I’ll ever get back in refining a script or vim config or whatever, so that later, when I’m busy and don’t have time to muck around, I can stay in the flow and not be annoyed by distractions.
7. skydhash ◴[22 Oct 25 23:01 UTC] No.45676239{3}[source]▶
Sometimes, you explore to have ideas. By fixing a few problems like these, you learn about technologies that can help you in another situation.
8. duskdozer ◴[23 Oct 25 01:11 UTC] No.45677094{3}[source]▶
Maybe, but

1. even if it costs more time, it could also save more annoyance which could be a benefit

2. by publishing the scripts, anyone else who comes across them can use them and save time without the initial cost. similarly, making and sharing these can encourage others to share their own scripts, some of which the author could save time with

9. janalsncm ◴[23 Oct 25 03:47 UTC] No.45677970{3}[source]▶
Not all time is created equally though, so I disagree with that xkcd.

If something is time sensitive it is worth spending a disproportionate amount of time to speed things up at some later time. For example if you’re debugging something live, in a live presentation, working on something with a tight deadline etc.

Also you don’t necessarily know how often you’ll do something anyways.