Ask HN: What kind of Software "Jigs" do you have?

Long ago the libraries I wrote in Turbo Pascal were a sort of jig. The way I wrote comments was another.

  12/31/2023 - MAW - Added example

I think of a lot of conventions and practices that I always did, no matter what as something like a foundation.

The pkZip archives on floppy disk, got replaced with Git eventually. It's a new, better jig. Or maybe better yet is the .ignore file I always copy into a new repo.

There are a lot of code generators, like lex/flex, bison/yacc, re2c, ragel, lemon, antlr, gperf, xxd. Maybe they don't count because they're pre-existing tools, but you can see how they might have started as a one-off tool and grew from there. I've written plenty of my own, either to generate code or generate tables of data at compile time.

Script generating DBO class skeleton from DB table (I've made and used 20 years ago).

Any library?

Edit: staged computation?

Do Makefiles count?

I set up various incantations like:

make build

make run

make test

make lint