My Daily-Driver Tools in 2026

A snapshot of the tools and hardware I use every day for coding, browsing, designing, recording videos, and staying organized.

This is the small collection of tools and hardware I reach for every day. I care a lot about keeping my screen focused and my workspace easy to move between.

It is not a definitive setup guide—just the setup that has earned a place in my daily work.

Herdr is where each project and coding agent gets its own persistent workspace. I keep Codex in one terminal pane and my development servers in another, and Herdr keeps those sessions intact when I close my laptop or lose the connection.

AeroSpace

I use AeroSpace as my window manager. It automatically tiles my windows and gives me keyboard-driven workspaces, which keeps the 13-inch screen organized without manual resizing.

Zed

Zed is my editor. It is where I spend my time reading and writing code, and it is the editor I naturally reach for when I open a project.

VS Code

I only open VS Code for Git changes. Its Source Control view makes it easy for me to review a change set because staged files and unstaged files stay clearly separated.

Codex

Codex is the AI coding assistant in my everyday setup. It lives in its own Herdr pane alongside the dev server, so it feels like a natural part of the project workspace instead of another application competing for attention.

Pi

Pi is my lightweight terminal coding harness. I like how little it puts between me and the model, but two gaps keep it from being ideal for me: it does not include OpenCode's one-action revert for undoing every change from an agent turn, and it has no built-in trajectory view for tracing the agent's path through a task. I recently saw the latter in DeepSeek Harness, but I do not use it because its web GUI does not fit my preference for CLI harnesses.

The browser

Brave

I use Brave because most of my work needs to support Chromium-based browsers. Its built-in blocking is useful, but Chrome compatibility is the main reason it stays in my setup.

Zen

My Raspberry Pi runs Pi-hole to handle ad blocking across my network, and I keep uBlock Origin enabled in Zen for browser-level filtering. Zen's sidebar-first layout also helps me reclaim vertical space on a 13-inch laptop and keeps the browser easy to navigate without making the page feel cramped.

The supporting tools

Notion

Notion is where I keep my notes. It is the place I return to when an idea, a project detail, or something I want to remember needs a home.

Figma

Figma is my design canvas. When I need to work through an interface or turn an idea into something visual, it is the tool I use.

Eraser

I use Eraser for drawing diagrams. It is where I sketch the relationships and flows that are easier to understand visually than in a wall of text.

Raindrop.io

Raindrop.io is where I save and organize bookmarks, so useful links do not disappear into a browser tab or an unstructured bookmark bar.

Apple Passwords

I use Apple Passwords for everyday logins, passkeys, and autofill across my Apple devices.

`pass`

For terminal workflows, I use pass, the command-line password manager. It fits naturally with the rest of my command-line setup.

The hardware

MacBook Air

My main computer is a 13-inch MacBook Air in Sky Blue with an Apple M5 chip, 24 GB of memory, 1 TB of storage. It was an upgrade from my Midnight MacBook Air with an M3 chip, 8 GB of memory, and 256 GB of storage. I posted the upgrade on X when I bought it, joking that 16 GB was no longer enough.