The One Tool I Adopted The Week After Day 365

Year two started on April sixth. By April seventh I was using a new tool in production. I want to write about it because it violates advice I gave myself in the capstone.

The business problem is real. Tool evaluation is expensive. Every hour spent trialing something new is an hour not shipping. The rule I set for myself was simple. Do not adopt anything new unless it removes a decision I already made.

The tool

It is a small CLI called just. A command runner. Think make without the legacy baggage. I had a Justfile instead of a Makefile by Tuesday afternoon.

# Justfile
default:
    just --list
 
deploy:
    vercel --prod --yes
 
test:
    pytest -x
 
migrate:
    python manage.py migrate

That is the whole file for three of my projects.

Why it passed my own test

It removed a decision. I used to remember whether a project used npm run, a shell script, or a Python task runner. Now every project has the same entry point. just <thing>. Muscle memory is now universal across my repos.

What I dropped

Three bespoke shell scripts per repo, a handful of package.json scripts I never ran, and a mental tax I did not know I was paying.

The lesson

Year two is not about adding fewer things. It is about adding things that collapse decisions across the whole pot. See the just docs if you want to try it. Fifteen minutes to set up. Pays back weekly.