What I use to ship.
Inspired by uses.tech. The exact hardware, editor setup, AI tools, and methodology I use day-to-day to build production AI. Updated as things change.
Hardware
MacBook Pro M3
Daily driver. 16″, 36GB RAM.
External monitor — LG UltraFine 27″
4K, vertical for code reviews.
Logitech MX Master 3S
Worth every fil.
Keychron K2
Brown switches.
Editor & coding
Cursor
AI-first editor. Worth the subscription.
VS Code
Backup. Same extensions where it matters.
GitHub Copilot
On for boilerplate, off for architecture.
Theme: Tokyo Night Storm
Easy on the eyes for long sessions.
Font: JetBrains Mono
Ligatures on.
AI tools
Claude Sonnet 4 / Opus 4.5
Primary AI pair-programmer.
ChatGPT (GPT-5)
Second opinion + image generation.
Cursor agents
Long-running refactors.
Perplexity
Up-to-date research.
Groq Playground
Latency-sensitive prototyping.
Terminal & shell
Warp
AI-native terminal.
zsh + Oh My Zsh
Powerlevel10k prompt.
lazygit
Faster than the GUI.
ripgrep, fd, bat
The unix toolkit, modernised.
Languages & frameworks
TypeScript
Frontend + Node services.
C# / .NET 8
15 years and still my favourite for backend.
Python
ML / scripting / FastAPI.
Next.js 14
App router. This site runs on it.
Tailwind CSS
Productive when constrained.
AI / infra stack
Azure OpenAI
Production GPT-4o for SCAD systems.
Groq
Sub-second Llama 3.3 70B for low-latency UX.
Pinecone
Serverless vector DB.
Cohere rerank
Precision lift on retrieval.
LangChain / Semantic Kernel
Orchestration when warranted.
Productivity
Notion
Specs, notes, project tracking.
Obsidian
Personal knowledge base.
Linear
Issue tracker for solo & team projects.
Raycast
Replaced Spotlight years ago.
Arc Browser
Workspace per project.
Methodology
Evaluation harnesses, always
Before models, before prompts.
Measure latency, accuracy, cost
Three numbers, every release.
Two pizzas, one ticket
If it can't fit, split it.
Boring tech wins
Production AI on Azure, not bleeding-edge OSS.
Last updated · May 2026