A running list of the tools I actually reach for, with a line on why each one earned its place. This isn’t a skills list — the CV has that. These are the smaller things: the ones I run every day, and the ones I’m glad to remember exist on the day I need them.

Environment and runtimes

• mise — one version manager for every runtime, and a task runner besides: the handful of commands a project needs, without a Makefile to keep them in.

Terminal and shell

• Warp — command output split into blocks, which turns a two-hundred-line terraform plan into something you scroll back to rather than hunt for.

Editor and AI-assisted development

• VS Code — took over from Atom years ago and hasn’t been seriously challenged since. These days it’s as much the thing devcontainers and agents attach to as the thing I type in.
• Claude Code — the agent itself; everything below is a way of running it.
• Conductor — runs several of them in parallel, each in its own git worktree, so unrelated tasks don’t fight over one working tree. This page was built in one.
• Paseo — what I’m trying out as Conductor’s successor. A desktop client over a daemon that runs inside a devcontainer, so the containment below comes with the setup instead of being arranged per project.
• Dev Containers — the blast radius. An agent running unattended against a platform should be able to break its container and nothing else, which is what makes letting it run unattended a reasonable thing to do.

Infrastructure and cloud

• dyff — a diff for YAML that reports each change by its path in the document rather than by line, so a re-indented or re-ordered manifest stops looking like a rewrite. Export it as KUBECTL_EXTERNAL_DIFF and kubectl diff shows you what actually changes before it lands.

Reference and docs

• DevDocs — quicker than hunting across five official doc sites.

Last updated August 2026.