Plain Tools

I like using open source software tools to automate the tedious parts of daily work. Increasingly, however, I find that modern tools come with complicated build processes or large dependency trees. I’ve spent a surprising amount of time just trying to set up a machine to run them.

This site documents my attempt to work differently: to learn how to build and use plain tools.

A plain tool is deliberately modest. It is typically:

• self-contained (often a single file),
• runnable with minimal setup,
• built on widely available foundations,
• free from complex or unnecessary frameworks and dependencies for the task at hand.

The emphasis is on building tools that can be easily run and understood, and handed over without elaborate infrastructure or specialist knowledge.

Inspirations

The ideas on this site are influenced by work that emphasizes simplicity, restraint, and building software that remains understandable and useful over time.

• D. Richard Hipp — through SQLite, which demonstrates how careful design, minimal dependencies, and a strong commitment to simplicity can produce software that is open source, widely deployed, and long-lived.
• Cay Horstmann — in particular his talks on Small Java and Java for Small Coding Tasks, which argue for using a general-purpose language and its standard tools directly, without heavy frameworks, to build small programs.
• Dave Thomas (“Prag Dave”) — especially his work on simplicity, judgment, and avoiding accidental complexity in software development.
• Simon Willison — particularly his writing and examples of build-free, single-file tools, including both plain HTML utilities and self-contained, uv-based Python scripts designed to be easy to copy, run, and inspect.