Open-Source on Luther Monson

Breaking Changes Without Breaking Trust: Five Years to go-proxmox v0.8

Sun, 04 Oct 2026 19:40:00 -0700

go-proxmox had its first commit in June 2021 and v0.8.2 went out on September 30th. In between there were 366 commits and 43 people besides me with a merged PR. More to the point of this post, there are downstream projects that I don’t control pinning it in their go.mod. IONOS’s Cluster API provider and Sidero’s Omni Proxmox provider are both on v0.8.1 today. A library with users like that gets judged less on its API. It gets judged more on what happens to their build when they bump the version. I didn’t always get that right, so here is the history, measured.

shipmates: Persona-Based AI Coding Crews That Remember

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 21:18:00 -0700

Since June most of my evenings have gone into shipmates, a Go CLI and daemon for running crews of AI coding agents. I tagged v0.5.0 on August 17th. That was two months and about 240 commits after the first architecture doc. So it’s a good time to write down what it is and why it exists.

The problem

I run a lot of agent sessions. On a normal night this workstation has four or five projects going at once. Each has a few Claude Code sessions doing different jobs: one reviewing, one writing tests, one chasing a bug. Two things kept annoying me.

Fixing Windows Archive Extraction in SPC

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 16:10:00 -0700

One of the first things that broke when I started building PHP on Windows with static-php-cli (SPC) wasn’t PHP at all. It was unpacking the source tarballs. libxml2, xz and a couple of others would die partway through extraction with:

ERROR: The pipe has been ended.

Over the last few months I’ve “fixed” this two different ways, and the maintainers fixed it a third. It’s a small piece of code. But it’s a good example of how much Linux assumption hides in a single shell pipeline, so here’s the whole thing.

Maintaining an Open-Source Library With AI Agents: AGENTS.md and the Rule They Kept Breaking

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 18:47:00 -0700

On May 9th I merged #264. It added an AGENTS.md to go-proxmox and a stub CLAUDE.md that just points at it. The next six weeks ran through the v0.8.0 migration guide on June 15th. In that time main took 77 commits and +31,794 / -1,144 lines. The repo went from 84 to 186 .go files. Endpoint coverage went from 30% to 100% of the Proxmox API. Most of that code was typed by coding agents, a lot of it by several at once. This is what that looked like from the maintainer’s chair. It’s mostly the parts that went wrong, because that’s where AGENTS.md got its content.

The Pragmatism of ePHPm - Every Decision Has a "Because" Behind It

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 19:05:00 -0700

ePHPm tagged v0.1.0 this week, three months after the first commit. Before the feature list grows any further I want to write down how decisions get made on it. This is mostly for myself. The easiest way to ruin a project like this is to let it turn into a checklist of things other projects have.

The pitch is simple. One binary that runs a PHP app with fewer moving parts than nginx + php-fpm + Redis + MySQL. Every feature has to trace back to that. If I can’t finish the sentence “this exists because…” with a real problem from running PHP in production, it doesn’t go in.

go-diskfs: Getting Rock Ridge Working for Joliet on Windows

Sun, 17 May 2026 20:40:00 -0700

go-proxmox has had a CloudInit() helper since 2023. It builds a small nocloud ISO in Go, uploads it to Proxmox and mounts it on the VM as a CD-ROM. It’s always worked fine for Linux guests. It has never worked for Windows guests running cloudbase-init. The reason is a filesystem extension from 1995 called Joliet.

Getting it fixed took three PRs to go-diskfs over about seven weeks. It also took a bug report from a user who ran it on Windows. That turned out to be the most important part.

Maintaining a Go Tool That Edits /etc/hosts on Every OS

Sat, 03 Feb 2024 19:22:00 -0700

Editing the hosts file sounds like the most boring problem in software. Read a text file, add a line, write it back. Then you find out your binary is being shelled out to from a Ruby Vagrant plugin on a Windows laptop with UAC prompts. Your library is being called in a loop by ddev. And every hosts file you parse was hand-edited by somebody at some point. I’ve been maintaining goodhosts for a few years now. I just spent a chunk of the fall and the holidays on it, so here’s what that looks like.