Apps that stay installed
We’ve tried a lot of developer tools. Most of them come and go. The short list below has survived on our team machines for years — each one solves a real friction point and gets out of the way the rest of the time.
Daily drivers
- Raycast — launcher that actually replaces Spotlight. The extensions ecosystem is where the real leverage is.
- Warp — modern terminal with blocks, inline completions, and sane defaults.
- Zed — fast, collaborative code editor. Our go-to for pair sessions.
- Linear — the least friction you can add between an idea and a tracked issue.
Quietly useful
- TablePlus — the database client you stop complaining about.
- Proxyman — inspect HTTP/S traffic without wrestling with a CLI.
- Rectangle — tiling window management in 30 seconds.
- 1Password CLI — pulls secrets into shell sessions safely.
“The tool you don’t think about while using is the one pulling the most weight.”
How we evaluate new tools
We try to keep the install list small. A new tool has to do at least one of three things before it earns a slot: remove a step we do every day, make a painful task fun, or unlock something we literally couldn’t do before. Everything else goes in the “maybe later” folder and usually stays there.
Your turn
If there’s a tool your team can’t live without, we’d genuinely like to hear about it. The best additions to our workflow have almost always come from someone else’s “you have to try this.” We read every reply.
