One Tool for the (Spell Checking) Job

I’ve built four spell-checking plugins in the last week. This is not an unhealthy interest in spelling. The cost of rolling tools out is the cost of tokens + my time supervising AI. So, before adding another language runtime, package manager, configuration file, and CI job to your project, consider spending an hour vibe coding the missing plugin. This blog used to run a Python spell checker that took more than three minutes. It’s a Jekyll blog, which is Ruby. Why was I maintaining a Python environment to tell me that I misspelled “hello”? I replaced it with a RuboCop plugin. Spelling became another cop, with the same configuration, exclusions, command, and CI integration as the rest of the checks. A Rust project shouldn’t need my Ruby setup to check its comments. A JavaScript project that already runs Prettier shouldn’t need an additional Markdown linter just to check spelling. You can either keep assembling a Frankenstein collection of tools, roll out a custom script, or you can ask…