· Jonathan Cutrer · Engineering · 3 min read
The Tools I Actually Use in 2026
Not a gear list for the algorithm. Just the software and setup I actually reach for every day — with honest notes on what I'd change.
I’ve written this post in my head about a hundred times and never published it, partly because it always felt like a flex post in disguise. So here’s the disclaimer: this is not a recommendations list. It’s documentation of what I actually use, maintained for my own reference and occasionally useful to someone else.
Editor
Neovim — I’ve been on Vim-based editors since before it was a personality trait, and I’m staying. The learning curve is real and worth it if you write code all day. I run a modest plugin setup via lazy.nvim: LSP through nvim-lspconfig, treesitter for syntax, telescope for fuzzy finding, and a handful of quality-of-life things I’d miss on day one without.
Occasional detour into VS Code for pair programming or when I need a GUI debugger and don’t want to configure one from scratch. Claude Code for heavy AI-assisted work.
Terminal
Kitty on Linux, iTerm2 on the rare Mac days. Fish shell with minimal config. I tried Zsh with Oh My Zsh for a while, but the startup time made me sad.
tmux for session management — I still have muscle memory for C-b splits from 2013 and I’m not reprogramming it.
Stack I Return To
- Python + FastAPI for APIs. SQLAlchemy for the ORM layer. Pydantic for everything that should be a typed schema but isn’t yet.
- TypeScript on the frontend. React when the project needs it, Astro when it doesn’t.
- PostgreSQL as the default database. I don’t use anything else unless there’s a strong reason, and there usually isn’t.
- Docker for local environments and deployment. Not Kubernetes — I don’t manage infrastructure at a scale that justifies the operational overhead.
- Cloudflare Pages + Workers for anything that can be static or edge-computed. Genuinely excellent and embarrassingly cheap.
What I’d Change
The honest answer is I’d switch to a better secrets management setup. I’m still doing too much .env file passing in projects that should have proper vault infrastructure. It’s on the list.
I’d also probably spend a week seriously evaluating Rust for some of the CLI tooling I currently write in Go or Python. The compile times are annoying but the correctness guarantees are hard to argue with once you’ve hit a class of bugs that Rust simply doesn’t allow.
What I’ve Tried and Left Behind
Emacs (twice — genuinely not for me), Spacemacs, Atom, every JavaScript bundler from 2015–2019, CoffeeScript, Grunt, Bower, several frameworks that no longer exist, and a brief but sincere flirtation with Arch Linux that ended around the third time I had to debug a broken pacman dependency tree on a deadline.
No regrets. You learn more from the tools you abandon than the ones you keep.
