Cross-posting from the CodeCaddy blog. Spencer and I just launched CodeCaddy and wanted to share the story behind it.
Our Slack DMs are a graveyard of one-liners.
"hey what was that kubectl jsonpath query you had for grabbing node names where a specific taint exists?"
"got that helm override handy? the one with the affinity rules"
"drop me the json shape you used for the webhook test"
"what was that cli command with all the flags you ran the other day"
"wait do you have the curl from when you were debugging the auth thing?"
We've been sending each other versions of these messages since college. Over a decade of side projects, hackathon entries, weekend experiments, "wouldn't it be cool if" ideas that turned into 2am pull requests. And the same pattern every time: snippets and one-liners flying back and forth across Slack DMs, Discord, text messages, email threads. Sometimes we'd find them again. Often we wouldn't. Sometimes we'd retype them from memory. Other times we'd just re-google the same thing for the fourth time.
We tried the usual workarounds. GitHub Gists felt heavy for one-liners. Notes apps weren't built for code. VS Code snippets were tied to one editor on one machine. Slack pinned messages worked until the pinned list hit 50 things and became unsearchable. We kept ending up back at: "lemme dig through my DMs."
At some point, somewhere between the fifth time one of us asked the other for the same curl command and the tenth time we re-derived the same jsonpath query, we said the thing every engineer says before they build a tool:
"This shouldn't be this hard."
So we built CodeCaddy.
What CodeCaddy is
CodeCaddy is a snippet manager built for the way platform engineers actually work. Save the kubectl jsonpath query. Save the Helm override. Save the JSON shape, the curl command, the one-liner you'll need again at 3am during the next incident. Tag it. Find it. Share it.
A few things that matter to us:
Local-first. Your snippets live in your browser by default. They never touch our servers unless you sign in and turn on cloud sync. The sensitive ones can stay private to your machine. The everyday ones can follow you between devices.
Versioned by default. Every save creates a revision. The Helm override you tweaked last Tuesday is still there if today's edit was a mistake. Open the Revision History panel and you can switch to or diff against any version you've ever saved.
Share without giving it away. Generate a time-limited share link tied to a specific revision. Read-only, expires when you say it does. Keep iterating on the snippet; the recipient sees the version you sent them. No public Gist, no permanent URL, no Slack DM scrollback.
Tags, not folders. Snippets aren't files in a hierarchy. A kubectl jsonpath query can also be incident-response and prod and taints at the same time. Filter by any tag and the right snippet surfaces.
Who it's for
CodeCaddy is for the people we've been for the last decade: platform engineers, SREs, infrastructure developers. The folks who live in terminals, write YAML for a living, and accumulate a head full of command-line knowledge that's worth more than they realize until they need it and can't find it.
If you've ever:
- Re-derived the same
kubectl -o jsonpathquery three times this month - Lost a Helm values override to scrollback during an incident
- Asked a coworker to "drop that JSON example again" because you can't find it in your DMs
- Built up a private collection of one-liners in a
notes.mdfile you can never search effectively
This is for you.
What's next
CodeCaddy is live at codecaddy.dev. Free to use locally, with optional paid cloud sync.
The roadmap is shaped by what users actually want, and we'd rather hear from you than guess. Drop into GitHub Discussions and tell us what's missing, what's broken, or what you'd build next.
This is the start. Thanks for being here.
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