Just do the thing
By Nate Nowack •
tribal knowledge
Every team has some bespoke operating procedures. Alex and I have a LOT of them! We’re trying to have less.
One way we’re doing this is by using just to codify common development workflows in justfiles:
- start a process to serve the docs locally
- preparing a release
- make sure you have
uvas a prerequisite for running other dev workflows
You’ll notice that you can place justfiles in any directory (like our docs directory), and then expose them in the root justfile via mod docs. This is a great way to keep recipes semantically organized in the codebase. Do we do this perfectly today? No! Will we continue to improve over time? Absolutely!
there are dozens of us!
Here are some more projects that have nice justfiles:
final thoughts
Not only is this super useful for broadcasting norms to other developers, but in this age it can also short-circuit a lot of Claude-splaining by pointing at your justfile from your CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md files.
As is a common theme for us, a big part of the value here is the interface that just provides. Maybe tomorrow we decide to use a different tool (besides mdxify) to generate our api reference docs, but humans and LLMs can still just api-ref to get the job done.