I’m not a tool collector. Every tool in my stack earns its place by saving me real time or making my work genuinely better. If something doesn’t pull its weight, it gets cut.
That said, 2026 has been a great year for developer tools. AI assistance has matured from “sometimes helpful” to “essential multiplier,” and the tooling around frameworks like Astro has gotten remarkably good.
VS Code remains my daily driver. I’ve tried the alternatives — Cursor, Zed, the Neovim rabbit hole — but VS Code’s extension ecosystem and stability keep pulling me back.
Key extensions:
.astro filesFor the terminal, I use the built-in VS Code terminal for project work and iTerm2 for system administration tasks. My shell is zsh with a minimal prompt — I don’t need a fancy theme, just git branch info and the current directory.
This is where things have changed the most. I use Claude Code as my primary AI coding assistant. It’s not just autocomplete — it’s a pair programmer that understands context, reads files, runs commands, and ships actual working code.
My workflow: describe what I want at a high level, review the plan, approve, and let it execute. I stay in control of architecture decisions while Claude handles the implementation details. It’s the closest thing to having a senior dev on call 24/7.
For quick questions and research, I use Claude directly in the browser. For code generation and refactoring, Claude Code in the terminal.
@theme syntax is cleaner than v3’s config file.The most valuable “tool” isn’t software — it’s the habit of building systems instead of doing tasks. Every manual process I repeat more than twice gets automated. Every project gets documentation. Every bug gets a lesson captured.
This is what separates productive developers from busy ones: not working faster, but eliminating work that shouldn’t exist in the first place.