A new "explain" command could help me, my team, and save us an enormous amount of time getting up to speed on some of our org's long-term system maintenance scripts.
The main difficulty I had with writing a command line utility is figuring out the UI in a console. Suggestions are welcome of course.
Also, there are two possibilities for a client: the first queries an API on explainshell.com by sending it a command line. This has the advantage of the client being thin, and using the centralized man page database which is probably more accurate. But this means that you're potentially not explaining the exact command you're running locally, which may be confusing.
The second option is to run the man page parser, matcher, etc. locally against the man page on your machine.
However, perhaps the best thing would be to allow both local and remote queries :-)
#shutupandtakemymoney (DevOps is fun, teaching not always)
I'd prefer a model where you download a definition file (if it needs to be "updated" at the start frequently)