What I'm Using in 2026

Hardware

Apple is still king for me. I am currently running an M5 MacBook Air (personal projects, side work), an M4 MacBook Pro (work for my main job), and an M4 Mac mini (general tasks, communications) as my daily machines. Beyond that I have an old iPad Pro (mostly media consumption at this point) and a relatively new iPad mini (news, trading, drawing, brainstorming).

Claude

Both Claude Code and Claude Desktop have won out for me in 2026. I'm sure that will change, maybe more than once before 2027, but for now Claude has become my daily go-to for coding and brainstorming. I still have my ChatGPT subscription, but I may end up canceling that in the near future. Cursor has completely disappeared from my workflow.

Ruby on Rails

This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, but I still reach for Rails when I start pretty much any web project unless there's a good reason or I'm just interested in trying out a new framework. A lot has been said (rightfully) about the speed of Ruby or the personality of DHH, but I think for developing most regular web applications there's still nothing quite like Rails. I have recently built with Payload, Next.js, Unity, Expo, and numerous other technologies, but Rails has been a near-constant for most of my career and it just feels like home. Even this site is a Rails 8.1 app.

Ghostty

This year I switched to Ghostty after several years of using Warp exclusively. The primary reason was realizing that I didn't want native AI in my terminal. I obviously use AI tools, but it just felt very obtrusive in this particular area. I want my terminal to be as clean and distraction-free as possible, and if I'm going to enter an LLM-generated command into my shell, I'm going to be reading it first. The things that sealed the deal were how well Ghostty works with Claude Code, its overall speed, its minimalist nature, and the hundreds of built-in themes.

LazyVim

I had been using Neovim for a couple years pretty consistently before Cursor came out. I've always changed editors pretty regularly, from Sublime Text and VS Code to various flavors of Vim, and back again. I used Cursor for at least a year because that was the first agentic coding tool that worked for me. But now that I'm using Claude Code almost exclusively it feels good to be back purely in the terminal. This time around I'm using LazyVim, a preconfigured Neovim setup, so I can spend my time relearning Vim instead of tinkering with my config.

chezmoi

As I'm juggling multiple machines, all of which I use for some amount of software development, I've found chezmoi to be a wonderful way of maintaining tools and settings across all of them. It is a dotfile manager at heart, but I've had trouble keeping my own dotfile repositories in sync and this has made things 10x easier.

Browser

After a couple years of using Arc almost exclusively, I have recently switched back to Google Chrome. Arc was a nice experiment. With its signature tab-on-the-side UI and its native use of "spaces," it definitely broke with the normal paradigm of the major browsers. However, they announced that they are stopping development and focusing on their AI-first browser, Dia, which is just something that doesn't (yet) appeal to me. Chrome has AI features too, but they stay out of the way. Chrome has also implemented things like vertical tabs, which made switching back easier. I also like the idea of using the same browser that most of my web users have.

Other

  • asdf has been my go-to language version manager for several years and I've found no reason to switch. It has a fairly simple interface and just works.
  • Homebrew installs nearly everything on my machines, and I keep it all in a Brewfile managed by chezmoi, so setting up a new Mac or keeping all three in sync is a single command.
  • OrbStack has emerged as a much more performant replacement for Docker Desktop that I've found to be very useful.
  • Byword is the writing app I'm using to type out this post. I've used it for years because it gets out of the way, and distraction-free writing is a must for me to get anything finished.
  • GitHub is still where every one of my personal projects lives. I have used GitLab and Bitbucket for various work projects in the past, and they work fine, but GitHub is still the standard for me. I've also been using the open-source Gitea recently, which works and feels just like GitHub in most respects.

Conclusion

None of these tools are going to surprise any engineer working in web development or other similar fields, but given how much has changed in the last couple years it felt appropriate to write these things down, even if only to compare them with what I'm using in 2027.