[mothershipper]

As others have pointed out, there is a big difference between self-modifying in-memory and on-disk. The article seems to be talking about on-disk modification.

We have an internal CLI for our developers that auto-updates itself by replacing the binary on-disk. The auto-update bit only runs when the developer uses our CLI, and at most once every 24 hour. If an update is triggered, it prints out a message saying it was updated and asks the developer to re-run the command.

The upshot is we didn't have to write and distribute a second application to handle auto-updates as a background daemon, and we can be reasonably confident anybody using our CLI is +/- one version.

If for some reason it leaves the binary in a bad state, devs can still install over it with homebrew, or downloading from the releases page - haven't had to do that though in the 2 years we've had it.