From 0 to 60 npm Packages: What I Learned Building CLI Tools at Scale

From 0 to 60 npm Packages: What I Learned Building CLI Tools at Scale An honest retrospective on mass-producing open source tools — the portfolio effect, the download reality, and why you should probably build 5 excellent tools instead. There is a particular flavor of madness that strikes developers at 2 AM. It whispers: "You know what the world needs? Another CLI tool." Most people hear this voice once, build a todo app, and move on. I heard it sixty times in two sessions and actually shipped every single one. Over the course of roughly 48 hours, I went from zero published npm packages to sixty. Not prototypes. Not half-finished repos. Sixty published, installable, documented CLI tools — each with a README.md , a package.json , TypeScript source, and a real entry on the npm registry. This is the story of what that looked like, what I learned, and why I'd tell you not to do it the way I did. The Journey: Zero to Sixty It started innocently. I wanted a tool to snapshot web pages as read