[dabedee]

From the article: "I added –dry-run on a whim early on in the project. I was surprised at how useful I found it to be."

Not to be overly critical (I think it's great OP found value in adding and using --dry-run), but I am willing to bet that this was a suggestion/addition from a coding agent (and most likely Claude code/Opus). Having used it myself to build various CLI tools in different languages, it almost always creates that option when iterating on CLIs. To the point where it's almost a tell. I wonder if we're entering a moment of convergence where all the tools will have similar patterns/options because they are similarly written by agents.

[SPBS]

> Early in the development process, when testing the incomplete application, I remembered that Subversion (the version control system after CVS, before Git) had a –dry-run option.

> I remembered how helpful that was, so I decided to add it to my command as well.

He mentions the reason he added it, and it's a compelling enough story to be true.

[dabedee]

Of course and I am not trying to point fingers. But I do think it's interesting because it's also possible that it is confabulation. Not lying, but genuinely constructing coherent explanations for decisions whose true origins are different than we recall. I think working with coding agents has already made this immensely more common.

[mpyne]

I had the equivalent of --dry-run in my kdecvs-build script from 2003 (where it was called --pretend) so it's not that spontaneous an idea that it must have been dreamed up by an AI.

Any time you have a script that needs to run for a long time or might involve destructive actions, having a way to run the script in a "tell me what you would do without actually doing it" mode is a fairly obvious user story to throw in.

[dabedee]

Again, it's completely possible that OP and you are the wonderful exceptions (untouched and uninspired by coding agents) that have been using these patterns for as long as you can remember. My comment revolved around the psychological phenomenon, not whether dry-run is a clever/novel idea. It's about how we might tell ourselves stories about the origin of our ideas when working with those tools.

[mpyne]

And my point is simply that if it were obvious enough an idea that I thought of it after initially using my tool, you probably will want to look for more realistic examples of where a person thinks they came up with an idea that was really prompted back to them in an AI chat.

This isn't something with surprising nuance like how a McDonald's milkshake serves a non-food "job to be done" during a shopper's morning commute. As evidenced by all the others in this thread pointing out other tools that do similar things, it's a fairly obvious idea to come up with after actually using a new tool.

You'd be more likely to learn about it doing product comparisons of other tools, although since there is a lot of common art for AI training to draw from, yes it is also possible to hear about it from your AI first.