Tools

The model I trust the most for discussions where uncertainty is high. It's so smart that the language can get a bit complicated. I love that it pushes back more than any other model.

My favorite model for design and frontend work. So much better than Sol at design. It feels like a lighter Fable.

My daily driver for almost everything else. It writes very good code if you give it a defined task. It goes extremely deep to figure things out and works great on big codebases.

Used with max effort, it's surprisingly smart. Extremely cheap. Like, dirt cheap. I use it mainly as a research subagent and am trying to figure out more use cases for it.

Mainly used as a research subagent, as it has access to posts on X. But it is surprisingly good at conversation and code. I am using it more and more.

The agent I trust with most of my day-to-day software work.

My second pair of eyes when I want a genuinely different take.

I use it daily to retrieve previous conversations. I do prompts like: “We have discussed this before. Use cass to pull the context.”

The ultimate task tracker for agents. Extremely valuable for making sure agents stay on track on larger tasks and remember things after compaction in longer threads. I love prompting: “Save this as a follow-up Bead after we have landed the main task.”

For big tasks, I send 4–8 agents into swarms to speed up implementation. A fairly new tool in my toolkit.

My favorite way to create a good feedback loop for agents. It fires up a headless browser that agents can navigate, with access to DevTools, the console, logs, and network traffic. I love prompting: “Use agent-browser to verify that this works on various viewports,” and it goes ahead and does it. I love that it doesn't hijack my computer or inflate my coding agents' resource use the way computer use does.

A fairly new tool in my toolkit. It helps NTM pick the right Bead task to work on. It is also a nice way for humans to see what epics the agents have planned.

Another favorite. It lets agents talk to each other. I prompt: “Get a second opinion on this from Fable 5 and Grok. Sort this out through agent_mail. Fable 5 is the coordinator,” and the agents go ahead and discuss the topic in detail, back and forth. Different models approach problems from different angles. Agent diversity is a real thing, just like with humans. This was more important when the models were weaker. Today, SOTA models one-shot excellent solutions more often, but I still find asking agents to iterate through Agent Mail very valuable.

There has been a lot of hype around MCP. A lot of services have launched MCPs, but not CLIs. The downside of MCPs is that they use some of your context window. For MCPs I barely use, I tend to use MCPorter to port the MCP into a CLI. Then I'll write a skill with a dense description for that CLI, instructing the agent when to use it.

The best way to keep track of your weekly usage. Very good when you have multiple accounts.

Headless, type-safe tools for the hard parts of modern web apps.

The full-stack React framework behind this site.

Open component code I can copy, own, and change.

Unstyled React components with the difficult behavior handled.

The world's most popular frontend library. Do I need to say more?

Types are cool, I guess.

Undervalued. Learning it.

AI models love it because of all the training data. I love it because it was the first web framework I learned. MVC makes so much sense to my brain.

When I want to have the leetest UX performance. Everything is TypeScript, from the backest of backend to the frontest of frontend. Really enjoy it. Really wish more people tried it out.

Super happy with everything they do. I know it's an AWS wrapper. But if that makes me avoid using AWS, I'm quite happy.

Where I make an interface real enough to argue with.

Makes every machine and device behave like they are on a local network, even though they are not. I have a Mac Studio at home where I host some internal servers, which I can then access from all my other devices.

Turns localhost:4274 into project.localhost. Just a small DX/UX thing I like a lot. Big fan of Vercel Labs’ work.

How I keep each project's toolchain out of every other project's way.

Very fast editor. I also use Sublime from time to time.

The most performant terminal.