My gut reaction is to rush to the comments to shill my favourite task runner ( mise tasks[1], now with shell aliases[2]!) but pushing past that, the core idea of writing scripts in a file rather than a shell prompt is a great nugget of wisdom. But I disagree with this bit:

"I want to be clear here, I am not advocating writing “proper” scripts, just capturing your interactive, ad-hoc command to a persistent file."

What's the difference? Why not version control it, share it with colleagues. Imagine writing a unit test to test a new feature then deleting it when done, what a waste. Ok it's not exactly the same because you aren't using these scripts to catch regressions, but all of that useful learning and context can be reused.

I don't think the language you use for scripting is too important as long as the runtime is pinned and easily available on all engineers machines, perhaps using a toolchain manager like... mise[3].

[1] https://mise.jdx.dev/tasks/ [2] https://mise.jdx.dev/shell-aliases.html [3] https://mise.jdx.dev/dev-tools/

I don't understand this bit either, unless "proper" means Bash. Because no one should ever write Bash under any circumstances.

> What's the difference? Why not version control it,

Because I'm hardcoding directory paths.

Because I'm assuming things are set up a particular way: the way they are on my machine.

Because this is hardcoded to a particular workflow that I'm using here and now, and that's it.

Because I do not want to be responsible for it after no longer needing it.

Because I don't want to justify it.

Because I'm hard-coding things that shouldn't be checked in.

Because I don't want to be responsible for establishing the way we do things based on this script.