My daily stack now, and why it is much faster

My daily setup looks very different from three or four years ago. Back then I practically lived inside VSCode, with a browser next to it holding a dozen StackOverflow tabs. That was the rhythm: write a bit, hit a wall, go search.

The loop was always the same. Write code, get stuck, switch to the browser, read five different answers, grab one, paste it, then bend it until it fit. It worked, but it was full of context switching, and most of it ran through the mouse.

Now I mostly live in the terminal. I use tmux to split work into panes and sessions, Neovim with LazyVim as my editor, and Claude Code as an AI pair sitting right there in the same window. No jumping out to a separate app.

The small tools carry a lot of the weight. ripgrep and fzf let me find anything in a project in an instant. lazygit handles git without my hands leaving the keyboard. A handful of fast Rust command line tools replaced the slow defaults, and Starship keeps the prompt telling me what I need to know. I even wrote a small tool of my own to trim the token cost of working with AI all day.

But the biggest change is not the tools, it is the habit. I stopped searching and started asking. Instead of combing through StackOverflow, I describe the problem, get a direction, and my work turns into weighing and deciding rather than digging.

Staying in one place matters more than it sounds. No more jumping between an editor, a browser, a terminal, and a git client. Everything is a keystroke away. Less friction, and a lot more flow.

The result is that my productivity is at its best. Not because I type faster, but because the distance between “I have a problem” and “it is solved” got much shorter.

None of this is magic. The AI still hands me wrong answers, and the tools still need me to understand what I am doing. I decide, I review, I stay responsible. The setup only removes the busywork so I can spend my attention where it matters.

If you want to get more out of AI in your daily work, a few things helped me. Bring it into where you actually work, the terminal or the editor, not a separate tab you keep forgetting. Ask it to explain, not just to answer, so you keep learning. Keep your hands on the wheel, and treat its output as a draft, never the final word. Then spend one weekend setting up your tools properly, you will earn that time back every single day after. Start small: pick the one thing that annoys you most, and remove it.