Last year was probably the most transformative in terms of simply how many new products have come out and how fast people have been improving and shipping updates. Also I have tried to improve my dev workflow with some success (I am the judge ofc). In this post I will cover the major changes in my workflow and the things that are part of it.
The Essentials
Editor - Zed
The IDE is dead, long live terminal agents. I probably read tweets on this line more than a thousand times after claude code came out. I could never not use an IDE though.
I had been a VSCode boy for a long time (probably since my college). I had switched to Cursor at the start of the year. The AI edits were next level. Composer did work but didn’t work as expected most of the times. Claude code came out after a few months. I started using it like most around me. At the same time I had started dabbling around with vim, starting the vim extension in cursor. Primarily inspired by a few people around me and ThePrimaegen speaking about it.
After getting familiar with a few key vim movements I tried NeoVim. Started with lazyvim. Liked the minimal setup required, then I messed it up while doing some updates or installing some plugins. Then I tried the neovim setup that my friend had made and made some changes to it.
Around the same time I saw some Twitter activity on Zed. I had tried it for some time when they had launched. I was unhappy with the lack of extensions, so never continued. Tried them again, loved the first class vim integration and they had added support for most tooling. And boy was it fast. Since then I never moved off of it. I do use neovim sometimes on occasion though.
Terminal - Ghostty
I was using warp at the start of the year. It felt warp kept getting heavier when they started going a lot into agentic coding. Friend suggested Ghostty and I got on it. I like that it’s simple, there are keyboard shortcuts for splitting, navigating and zooming in.
Coding agent - Codex
This one will be fun to go into. I started with Cursor Composer. Then moved to Claude Code like everyone around me. I was a bit cost wary at first and claude code just sometimes swallowed up context. To take a break I tried the Zed agent with Claude keys, opencode and Cline. Never really felt too attached to any of them.
Then came Plan Mode. Cline was good with the plan mode then Claude Code introduced it. I liked that as now I could stop Claude from going haywire when writing code. Do a few iterations on planning and then execute at once. But I still felt I had to keep course correcting claude a lot. I gave up the agents and went back to Ape Coding.
After a month or so, I started hearing Codex had gotten much better and gpt-5 was also released. gpt-5 was
slow, but I liked the results. I did less of handholding and around >75% of the times, it nailed the results. Then the game
changed when they released gpt-5.1-codex. It was simply much better suited for how I wanted to work with
agents. I never moved away from it. I tried the 4.5 opus and sonnet but always felt codex had much better
taste. I have been using the newest 5.3 codex as my daily driver now along with the new codex app.
Most recently I’ve been playing around with Pi, it is a simple tool and gets most low-medium tasks done easily. I still rely on codex for medium-high tasks. That being said I’ve been lazy and not really customized Pi to be exactly how I want it.
Browser - Zen
I use Zen browser now. I switched from Firefox after a few months of last year. I had been a Firefox user for quite a long time. I liked Zen since it had the gecko engine as the base and I could simply port over all my extensions and just login with Mozilla to keep using existing Firefox stuff. I also use Firefox on my phone.
I also like that Zen has mods to customize the UI a little bit. I never got into any of the AI browsers, tried Dia and Comet for a day or two, which I didn’t really like.
Meetings - Granola
I don’t have many meetings, a few team syncs a week and some company wide meetings a month. I have been using Granola for 7–8 months. Before that I had a meeting note-taker tool (Fireflies). I hate that in a zoom meeting there are 2–3 note-takers present. Granola works locally, listens to your audio input and output and creates summaries and notes from it. You can categorize these into folders. Their basic plan just works for me.
MacOS tools
Raycast
Raycast is a Spotlight replacement that has shortcuts to most things you want to do and enables you to do that from your keyboard. They have a very good extension system and people have built some super useful extensions.
My most used ones are actually resizing windows (with hotkeys), change scroll direction, clipboard history, quicklinks to most visited webpages. You can control a lot of applications from it. I use the Slack and Spotify one when it’s minimized and I can’t bring it back up without using my mouse (XD).
Best part is you can add hotkeys to any action on Raycast and customize your own shortcuts which I have done.
Terminal tools
lazygit
I like using this as I might not open the IDE for just looking at the diff. At any given time, I will have
a Ghostty window available so it’s easier to just do lg and quickly see the diff.
yazi
Yazi is cool to navigate file system through your terminal. I used it a lot to quickly copy paths of files
(before all these agents allowed you to mention files - context is important). I also use it to quickly
view files and navigate to directories quickly (you enter using y command and exit using q on any directory
to instantly go there in the terminal)
oh-my-zsh
I have been using oh-my-zsh for a while now. My setup is quite barebones. I have z, git, zsh-syntax-highlighting
and zsh-autosuggestions as the plugins installed. z is quite helpful for quick navigation and git gives you a lot
of aliases. My first instinct is to use these git aliases on any system now.
gh
The github CLI is good for checking out branches, creating PRs, opening PRs in browser, cloning repos etc. I use it over using their UI if possible.
Honorable mentions
Klack
It’s a tool that emulates mechanical keyboard sounds. It’s nice to use when I don’t have any of my keyboards with me or am on the couch.
I think that’s pretty much the key stuff I use on an everyday basis. The list is of course ever evolving. I will probably edit this one or post one more after 6 months if there are any changes. Ciao.