Building toolmaking.net: A Home for Small, Sharp Tools

I keep building small tools for myself: a CLI that answers questions in the terminal, a script that shrinks my video archive. Until now each one lived in its own GitHub repo with a README and not much else. This week I launched toolmaking.net as the single front door for all of them.

Why a dedicated site?

A repo README is written for someone who already found the repo. It answers “how do I build this?” far better than the questions a first-time visitor actually has: what does this thing do, what does it look like when I run it, and why should I trust it on my machine?

That last question matters more than people admit. Running a stranger’s script is an act of trust, and a list of flags in Markdown does little to earn it. What earns it is seeing the real output, understanding the guardrails, and being able to read every line of the source before you execute anything.

So each tool on toolmaking.net gets a proper page instead of a README: a one-line install with a copy button, a terminal-style demo showing actual output, and the safety behavior spelled out up front. No signup, no docs maze, no marketing funnel. The page’s only job is to get you from “what is this?” to running it in under a minute.

The philosophy

The about page compresses the whole idea into one line: the best tools are small, sharp, and free.

• Small. Each tool does one job and stays out of the way when you do not need it. No background daemons, no config sprawl, no accounts to create before the thing works.
• Sharp. Precision-engineered to do that one job well, inside your terminal and your environment, rather than being a platform that wants to become your environment.
• Free. Open source, released so you can read every line before you run it. No tracking of your work, no paywalls, no feature tiers.

These are utilities built to be depended on, not products built to be sold. That constraint shapes everything on the site: if a tool needs an account or a subscription to be useful, it does not belong there.

What’s there now

Two tools are live at launch.

ask is the featured one, currently at v0.2.15, and it already has its own write-up here. It puts an LLM in your terminal, so a question like “how do I list files by size?” never requires leaving the shell:

$ ask "how do I list files by size?"
ls -lhS

It runs against local providers (Ollama, LM Studio) or cloud ones (Anthropic, OpenAI), extracts single commands for quick copying, and can call your own shell functions as tools when the model needs to reach beyond its training.

Video Compressor is a small Python script that re-encodes videos to H.265/HEVC for dramatically smaller files. A typical run looks like this:

$ python3 compress_videos.py ~/Movies
[2/5] Compressing: holiday_footage.mov (3.2 GB, 12:34)
OK: 3.2 GB → 1.1 GB (saved 2.1 GB, 65.6%) → holiday_footage[comp].mp4

The interesting part is what it refuses to do. Originals stay untouched until each encoding is verified, and if the output is not at least 5% smaller, it is discarded rather than replacing a perfectly good file with a worse one. A --dry-run flag previews exactly what would happen without encoding anything, and the hvc1 tag keeps the results playable in QuickTime and across macOS. Install is one curl plus ffmpeg.

What’s next

The catalog is deliberately short. A tool gets a page only after I have used it long enough to trust it myself, which means the site will grow slowly and on purpose. There are a few candidates already sitting in my dotfiles and scripts folders, but they ship when they earn it.

If one of the tools is useful to you, the source is linked from every page, and issues and ideas are welcome there.

• Site: toolmaking.net
• Source code: github.com/nimahejazi