2026-03-18
two days after publishing the spec I needed to prove it worked. not a server. just a tool that could exercise every part of the protocol and tell me if something was broken.
keygen. sign. verify. resolve a URI. crawl the gossip layer and map every node it finds. probe a channel and pull its metadata. every protocol operation got a command. 67 tests against all 7 test vector suites. if the tests pass, the spec works.
I picked go for one reason. single static binary. no runtime, no dependencies, no installer. cross-compile for seven platforms from one codebase and ship.
there’s a vanity miner in there too. every channel ID starts with TV. that’s the version bytes. but you can brute-force keys until the rest spells something. mine says TVLoop. took about ten minutes. purely cosmetic but I like it.
I had cathode half-built at this point. the server. kept hitting walls with the UI and the API layer. the CLI was simpler. small scope, one command at a time, tests that either pass or don’t. it became the place where progress actually happened.
if you want a sneak preview of what this toolkit became, here it is.
— pfarnsworth