Stack
The software I keep coming back to, and what each piece is actually for.
Productivity & Security
My editor theme, drawn from Vercel's palette and One Dark Pro. The contrast is low enough to sit in front of all day without the syntax colours getting loud.
Passwords, SSH keys and API tokens. The CLI matters as much as the app: a script can read a secret straight from the vault instead of me pasting it somewhere it will be forgotten.
Email aliases, a different address for every service. Kept separate from the password manager on purpose, so one breach does not hand over both the login and the address it belongs to.
Where articles, tools and references go so they can be found again. The tagging is the part I actually rely on; without it this would be another folder of dead links.
Development
Written in web technology, which makes themes and plugins something I can edit rather than file a request about. Electron, and still quick enough that I never think about it.
Codex, SFTP and Natizyskunk stay enabled; everything else is per workspace. Project-specific settings beat one global config that is wrong for half the repositories.
Snippets, clipboard history, window management and a handful of my own scripts. Most of what I would otherwise keep in a menu bar now lives behind one shortcut.
AI & Intelligence
My default for anything that needs to hold a whole codebase in its head at once: architecture decisions, review, and changes that touch a dozen files and have to stay consistent across all of them.
The agent I run in the terminal and in VS Code. It reads the repository, runs the tests and makes the edits, which suits refactors where the hard part is finding every call site rather than writing the new one.
Fast prototyping and multi-file refactors. Sonnet is the right trade here, quick enough that the tab completions arrive before I have finished deciding what I wanted.
Scaffolding and one-off generation straight from the terminal. Useful for the small jobs that are not worth opening an editor for.
Brainstorming, first drafts of documentation, and working out a problem by explaining it. A second opinion when I have been staring at something too long.
Long documents and anything where the context runs past what I want to split up by hand. Its reading of large inputs is the reason it stays in the rotation.
Inline completion in VS Code. Earns its place on boilerplate and test files, where the next twenty lines are obvious and I would rather not type them.
MCP Servers
Deploys, environment variables and site configuration handled from the assistant instead of a dashboard in another tab.
Generating screens and design variants when a frontend idea is faster to look at than to describe.
Geocoding and geospatial data for location features, without writing a throwaway client every time.
Checks dependencies for known vulnerabilities, licence problems and general health before they are in the lockfile rather than after.
Utilities
DNS and VPN. Mostly earns its keep when an API decides my connection is the problem.
Custom trackpad gestures for window snapping and app switching. The kind of thing that feels pointless until you use someone else's machine.
Brightness and volume on an external display from the keyboard, the way the built-in one has always worked.
The next meeting in the menu bar and one click to join it. Reads straight from Google Calendar.
Hides the menu bar icons I do not need so the few that matter are visible at a glance.
Shows Caps Lock state on screen. Small, and it has saved me from more mistyped passwords than I would like to admit.
Asks which browser or profile a link should open in, which keeps client work and my own accounts from mixing.
A one-click camera check from the menu bar before a call starts.
My Configs & Dotfiles
Oh My Zsh and Powerlevel10k, plus the aliases and functions that have accumulated to the point where a bare shell feels broken.
settings.json, keybindings and the extension list, synced so every machine behaves the same way.
Terminal theme, plugins and shell integration. Deliberately minimal, since every addition is something else that can break on an update.