What I learned shipping a CLI tool

Shipping a CLI tool taught me that command-line users have a much less forgiving audience than most software gets. A slow start-up time or a confusing flag name gets noticed immediately, because the whole point of a CLI is that it gets out of the way.

The biggest improvement wasn't a feature — it was deleting flags. Every option I removed made the tool easier to explain in one line, which turned out to matter more than covering one more edge case.

I also learned to write error messages assuming the reader is mid-task and annoyed, not reading documentation. "Config not found" is worse than telling them the exact path it looked in.