I Built a Terminal AI Companion in 300 Lines of Pure Bash — And It's MIT Licensed

I write a lot of bash scripts. Most of them work. Some of them don’t — and when they don’t, I spend 20 minutes staring at an error message that, in retrospect, was actually pretty obvious. I figured: what if I could just ask an AI, from my terminal, what went wrong? That’s bashbuddy. 300 lines of pure bash. No npm. No Python. No dependencies beyond curl and jq. MIT licensed, free forever. ...

August 4, 2026 · 4 min · Pragmatic Sysadmin

I Built a Tool That Explains Any Command or Error in Plain Language

Every sysadmin has the same job, really. It’s not “manage servers.” It’s not “configure networks.” It’s: explain technical things to non-technical people. My dad calls me. Something’s wrong with his computer. He says: “It says something about DNS and the connection isn’t private.” What do I actually need to tell him? I could say: “Your router’s DNS resolution is failing because the ISP’s nameserver at 8.8.8.8 isn’t responding, causing an SSL handshake failure due to certificate verification timing out.” That’s accurate. It’s also useless. What I actually say: “Your internet is having a momentary hiccup. Turn the router off and on, wait 30 seconds, try again.” Same fix. Better explanation. That’s the gap I tried to fill with Plain English. ...

August 4, 2026 · 5 min · Pragmatic Sysadmin

What IT Pros Actually Do On Their Own Machines (vs What They Tell You)

What IT Pros Actually Do On Their Own Machines (vs What They Tell You) There’s the advice IT hands out. The official line. The stuff in the company handbook. Then there’s what actually happens on the machines of the people who wrote that handbook. I’m not here to throw anyone under the bus. But after years in this industry, there are some pretty consistent gaps between what gets preached and what gets practised. And honestly? Closing that gap will make your computing life significantly better. ...

March 18, 2026 · 7 min · Pragmatic Sysadmin
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