Team Tricks

Shared knowledge base for programming / environment / tooling gotchas that cost someone real time to figure out. The goal: nobody on the team should burn an afternoon on a problem a teammate already solved.

When to write one

If you lost more than ~30 minutes to something and the fix wasn't obvious, it's a trick. Write the file before you close the tab.

How to add a trick

1. Copy TEMPLATE.md to tricks/YYYY-MM-DD-short-slug.md.
2. Fill in the frontmatter (especially symptoms — see below).
3. Write the Problem / Fix body.
4. Open a small PR (or push directly, per team norm). One file per trick.
5. Run python scripts/build_index.py to refresh the index below, or let CI do it.

How to find a trick

Search first. Everything is plain text in tricks/:

grep -ri "your error text" tricks/

The symptoms: field is the real index — it holds the words you'd actually type when stuck. If you solve something and had to search for it, add the exact phrase you searched to that entry's symptoms.

One file = one self-contained entry. This keeps grep clean today and makes it trivial to feed into an LLM / RAG search later (one file = one chunk).

Cadence

• Capture: at solve-time, always. Not batched.
• Monday review (5 min): walk git log tricks/ --since="1 week ago" to share what got added. This replaces "does anyone remember a trick from last week?"

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Date	Trick	Project
2026-07-27	Vitest vi.mock() silently no-ops under ESM	web-frontend
2026-07-26	Docker image "exec format error" on Apple Silicon	backend-services