Every shell user probably keeps their own bin folder with scripts/binaries to make their life easier. If not, they should. Mine’s not fancy, but like most command line practitioners, I’m somewhat proud of each time I use one I created. Some of my favorites:

today - prints today’s date in “2026.01.25”-like format. Mostly to cp -r ./folder ./folder-backup-$(today) or similar.

beep - plays a success sound. nix build; beep is the poor man’s way to get notifications after something finished or errors.

qr - generates a QR code in the terminal. echo "https://example.com" | qr for sharing to my phone or other’s phone.

my-ip - tells me my exit IP (thanks api.ipify.org!), plus some detection of whether I’m on a VPN or not, and other hints.

extract-url - greps all URLs from a file or stdin.

hey - describe what you want in plain English, get a shell command back. hey "find all files larger than 100MB modified in the last week" returns the right incantation. Feeling lucky: hey! doesn’t ask for confirmation and directly executes it.

autocommit - stages all changes, reads the diff, generates a conventional commit message (thanks Claude!).

summarize - sends a file to a local Ollama instance and gets back a summary.

Each script is a micro-decision I don’t have to make anymore. 30 seconds here, 5 seconds there, thinking about syntax, or options. The little things add up.