I stopped trusting curl | sh — so I built a tool that reads the script first

Every developer has done it. You hit a README, you see the install command: curl -fsSL https://example.com/install.sh | sh And you run it. Maybe you skim the script first. Maybe you don't. But you run it. I've been doing this for years. And each time, a small voice in the back of my head says: you have no idea what that script actually does. You just piped a stranger's code straight into your shell. Eventually I got tired of ignoring that voice. What the pattern actually is curl | sh is not a bad pattern — it's a fast, convenient pattern with a real trust gap. The script runs with your permissions, in your shell, right now. It can: Install something with sudo Delete files with rm -rf Write to your disk with dd Access your SSH keys or .env files Set up a cron job or a systemd service that runs again next reboot Decode and run a payload with base64 | eval Most install scripts do none of these things maliciously. But many do several of them legitimately — and you wouldn't know which ones until something went wrong. --- ## What I built instead I'm a solo founder based in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso. I build with heavy AI pairing — I'm not a trained engineer, I work with Claude, review the output, and ship. This tool ( peek ) was AI-paired and reviewed by me before release. peek is a ~130-line POSIX shell script that sits in front of the pattern: # Instead of: curl -fsSL https://example.com/install.sh | sh # Do: peek https://example.com/install.sh Before anything runs, peek: Fetches the script Scans it for risky patterns Prints a risk score and the exact dangerous lines Asks you to confirm — and refuses to auto-run a HIGH-RISK script unless you type RUN You can also pipe into it, or run it in analysis-only mode: curl -fsSL https://example.com/install.sh | peek # analyze from a pipe peek --print ./downloaded.sh # never runs, analysis only What it flags (and what it doesn't) The patterns peek checks: Root escalation — sudo , running as root Destructive file ops — rm -rf , fi