My developer tooling stack for 2026

Tool posts age badly, so here’s the honest version: this is what survived a year of real work, and what didn’t. This post is also MDX — it uses interactive components inside markdown, which this theme supports out of the box.

The rules

Three questions before anything gets installed:

1. Does it remove a step from something I do daily?
2. Will it still work if the company behind it disappears?
3. Can I configure it in a file that lives in a dotfiles repo?

Package manager

Still pnpm. The strictness that makes it occasionally annoying is exactly what makes monorepos survivable:

pnpm add astro
pnpm dlx create-astro@latest

npm install astro
npx create-astro@latest

bun add astro
bunx create-astro@latest

The CLI layer

The unglamorous winners, in order of keystrokes saved:

fzf        # fuzzy-find everything: files, history, branches
ripgrep    # grep, but you never wait for it
fd         # find with defaults that make sense
jq         # JSON surgery in pipelines
just       # make, minus the tab-based footguns
direnv     # per-project env vars that load themselves

Editor

VS Code with fewer than ten extensions. The controversial part of the config:

{
  "editor.formatOnSave": true,
  "editor.minimap.enabled": false,
  "editor.inlineSuggest.enabled": true,
  "workbench.activityBar.location": "hidden",
  "files.autoSave": "onFocusChange"
}

Hiding the activity bar sounds extreme until you realize every panel has a keybinding and your eyes stop drifting left.

What ties it together

A justfile in every repo, so that muscle memory transfers between projects:

dev:
    pnpm astro dev

check:
    pnpm astro check && pnpm eslint .

ship: check
    pnpm astro build && wrangler pages deploy dist

just dev, just check, just ship — same three commands in every project I own, regardless of what’s underneath.

The honest summary

The stack is boring on purpose. Every exciting tool I adopted in the last five years either became boring (good) or got deleted (also good). Optimize for the tools you’ll still be using when the trend cycle moves on.