This resonates. I actually ended up building a tool last year (CapSize) because I needed to churn out screenshots at a specific frame size for my day job and couldn't find anything that would just "lock" to 800x600 without a fight.

I'm not a dev by trade, so I did use AI as a power-tool to wrestle with the C++ and Electron parts. It turned into a bit of a rabbit hole—I ended up obsessed with keeping it entirely local/offline (no cloud APIs or telemetry) just to see if I could do things like local OCR in RAM. I ended up building two more tools to help me with making the one tool so it kind of spiraled into a small suite, but the main goal was just a no-frills utility that didn't require a login or a subscription just to crop an image.

code-server, instead of VSCode. I can build my own podman image on top of it with whatever dev tools I need for whatever languages I'm working with, and if I have to install something weird or something breaks I can just restart the container. Especially on my work machine that isn't Linux, I have this running in a VM and can just use in my browser and don't have to jump through hoops to get the dev environment I want. On my personal instance I also use it for automating building stuff from source. Before I had this, I just had build tools on pretty much every single machine I was building for and it was a hot mess.

https://github.com/coder/code-server

HTTP mock servers

I’m working on mockaton, which is mainly a filename convention based router.

https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton

For me it has to be mock. With it I can create and automate APIs easily.

https://dhuan.github.io/mock/latest/examples.html

I love deepwiki for understanding deep code architectures: https://deepwiki.com/

jq piped with curl for API debugging. Sounds obvious but I still see people open Postman for things that take 10 seconds in the terminal. `curl -s url | jq '.data[] | {id, status}'` and you're done.

Also `entr` for file watching — `ls *.js | entr -r node build.js`. Replaced like three different watch tools for me.

I've been using ack for a very long time, maybe 15 years.

It's like grep but faster and easier to use. I still use it all the time, even in the era of Claude.

https://beyondgrep.com/

A VS Code/Visual Studio extension for creating mind maps with nodes linked to code called Code Mind Map.

Tilix + shell scripts to create a Tilix session, open windows inside Tilix and run commands, so that I can immediately create a session to debug say Linux kernel development -- 3 windows, one for gdb, one for compiling and running, and one for minicom.

I'm sure Tmux can do it, but I really hate the Ctrl+B thing. Alt + Arrow keys are way more intuitive.

gitk and git gui

CUE and Dagger, though they are talked about by more than nobody

They are central to my personal dev tool

https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof

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