A small shout-out to an internal hero - NiceLicense.
NiceLicense is a small
guided CLI for picking and managing the LICENSE file in a
project. It has been sitting on GitHub for a couple of months now, but
with a fresh round of projects on the go it has quietly become one of
those tools we reach for without thinking.
Run npx nicelicense and it will walk you through choosing an
SPDX licence, pull the canonical text, fill in your name and year from
git config, and update the license field in
package.json if there is one. If a LICENSE file
already exists it will try to identify it by fingerprint before asking
whether to replace it. There is a non-interactive mode too, which is handy
in scaffolding scripts:
npx nicelicense --license MIT --yes --name "Jane Doe" --years 2026That's it! Just a small tool for the one job LLMs usually do badly: they hallucinate the text, mistranscribe it, or skip it altogether. If you spin up new repositories often, you may find it handy too. Source and issues on GitHub.