The short list of things I actually reach for.

Not an exhaustive setup post. These are the tools I’d be annoyed to lose, and nothing else.

Workstation

  • 16” MacBook Pro, M3 Max, 36GB RAM (2023)

    One machine for everything, personal and otherwise. The M3 Max is more than I need most days, which is exactly the point — I’d rather never think about whether the laptop can handle something.

Development tools

  • Cursor

    My editor, and I use it with Claude Code or Codex rather than instead of them. The interesting part isn’t autocomplete, it’s handing off the work you already know how to do.

  • Terminal.app

    The one that came with the Mac. I’ve tried the alternatives and never found the thing I was supposedly missing.

  • Next.js and Tailwind

    My default for anything with a web front end. Not because they’re objectively best, but because I stopped re-litigating the decision years ago and got on with building.

  • PostgreSQL

    If Postgres can do the job, I use Postgres. It has absorbed most of the reasons I used to reach for something else, and one boring database I know well beats three I half know.

  • Postico

    For the times a GUI beats psql — poking at unfamiliar data, or explaining a schema to someone over a screen share.