From Bash Script to AI-Native Go CLI in One Session

We’re living in the era of just-in-time software—tools built and shipped in a single AI coding session.

I had scribe.sh. It worked, mostly. But every time someone asked “how do I run this?”, I felt that familiar shame. You know the one.

So I opened a fresh AI session and said: let’s make this real.

# The Shift

AI collapsed the build cost for tooling.

The old path: keep script forever, maybe rewrite later, maybe never ship.

The new path: keep script as behavior spec, pair with AI, ship now.

In one session, we turned scribe.sh into scriby—a Go CLI with explicit commands, deterministic JSON output, proper exit codes, and a release pipeline.

That’s the difference between “a script on my machine” and “a tool agents and humans can trust.”

# One Binary, Done

The requirement: you install one binary. No README archaeology, no dependency hell.

scriby handles the rest:

1. Detects your platform
2. Downloads the whisper-cli runtime from GitHub releases
3. Pulls the model you asked for
4. Transcribes

ggerganov’s whisper.cpp did the heavy lifting. We wrapped it in something you can call without reading a wiki.

# The Gotcha

First release shipped. Users got:

Library not loaded: @rpath/libwhisper.1.dylib

In 2026, we’re still dealing with dylib issues. Feels like 2015.

The fix: bundle fully self-contained binaries. First-run just works now.

Scripts push this pain onto users. A proper CLI absorbs it.

# Usage

scriby run --model medium --language en ./meeting.wav

# The Takeaway

Look at your ~/bin. Find the script you keep copying between machines.

If it provides real value, you can now promote it to a proper tool in hours, not weeks. One focused session.

Go build it.