Day to Day Tools, the 2024 edition

Day to Day Tools, the 2024 edition

Russ McKendrick
Russ McKendrick โ€ข 5 min read โ€ข Suggest Changes
Tools ๐Ÿงฐ macOS ๐Ÿ
Glossary: Agent Skills AI Coding Assistant Application Programming Interface Claude Code Codex Command-Line Interface

It looks like I have written about the tools I use day-to-day since 2017; I wonder how much has changed. ๐Ÿค”

Desktop Apps ๐Ÿ’ป

  • Visual Studio Codeโ†—: This is still my primary IDE; I use it for all of the infrastructure as code I write along with any other code I need to write and debug, and trust me, there is more debugging going on than writing most of the time. ๐Ÿ›
  • Sublime Textโ†—: For raw text editing, I use a pretty vanilla version of Sublime Text. ๐Ÿ“
  • Pasteโ†—: I have used Paste for a few years. Itโ€™s great to have everything I have copied and pasted across my devices in an easy-to-use searchable database-Iโ€™m not sure what I would do without it now, as everything is a quick [CMD]+[Shift]+V away. ๐Ÿ“‹
  • 1Passwordโ†—: 1Password remains my password manager of choice, and it has been since I started blogging over ten years ago! ๐Ÿ”’
  • Draw.ioโ†—: Being a macOS user, I donโ€™t get to use what I assume is the โ€œawesomenessโ€ of Visio - luckily, this tool blows it out of the water ๐Ÿ˜ƒ ๐ŸŽจ
  • Bear Notesโ†—: Note applications have come and gone, but Bear Notes remains my go-to app. It has a clean interface, powerful markdown support, and seamless syncing across my devices. ๐Ÿป๐Ÿ“
  • Ivoryโ†—: This app is perfect for those who need a robust, feature-rich, and Tweetbot-like Mastonden client. Ivory provides a smooth and customizable user experience, making staying connected and engaged on social media easier. ๐Ÿ˜๐Ÿ’ฌ
  • iTerm2โ†—: iTerm is my terminal emulator of choice. It offers more features and customization options than the default Terminal app, including split panes, custom color schemes, and extensive keyboard shortcuts. ๐Ÿ’ป

Terminal Apps โŒจ๏ธ

  • OpenCommitโ†—: this CLI tool uses AI to automatically generate meaningful commit messages for your code changes. It generated the commit messages for this post if you look hereโ†—. ๐Ÿค–๐Ÿ’ฌ
  • Homebrewโ†—: Another mainstay of the tools I use, this is the only real package manager for macOS. It simplifies the installation of software and tools, making it easy to keep my development environment up-to-date. ๐Ÿบ
  • Terraformโ†— is an infrastructure as code tool that allows me to define and provision cloud resources using a high-level configuration language. I use it both at work and at home and covered in more detail here and wrote a book about which you can find hereโ†—. โ˜๏ธ๐Ÿ—๏ธ
  • Ansibleโ†— is my go-to automation tool for configuration management and application deployment. Its simple, agentless architecture makes it easy to manage and automate tasks across multiple servers. Oh yeah, I have also just released a book on it as wellโ†—. ๐Ÿค–๐Ÿ“š
  • Condaโ†— is an open-source package management and environment management system, see this post for more information. ๐Ÿ๐Ÿ“ฆ
  • Ollamaโ†— is a versatile tool for running and managing large language models (LLMs) locally. It supports various models like Llama 3, Mistral, and others, allowing you to customize and run LLMs efficiently on your machine. I covered this in more detail here. ๐Ÿฆ™๐Ÿง 

Services ๐ŸŒ

  • Grammarlyโ†— is an advanced AI-powered writing assistant that helps improve your writing by providing real-time grammar, spelling, and style suggestions. Itโ€™s indispensable for ensuring that all of my written content, from emails to blog posts, is clear, concise, and error-free. According to the weekly email I get there have been over 21,657,835 words analyzed by Grammarly since joined up on Nov 6, 2016. โœ๏ธ๐Ÿค–
  • ChatGPTโ†— by OpenAI is a conversational AI model that assists with generating human-like text based on the input provided. Itโ€™s useful for brainstorming ideas, drafting content, and even coding assistance, making it an essential tool for both creative and technical tasks - it also helped with some bits of this blog post. ๐Ÿ’ฌ๐Ÿค–
  • Midjourneyโ†— is an AI-based image-generation service that creates stunning visuals from text prompts. Itโ€™s a valuable tool for producing unique graphics, visual content, and creative illustrations for various projects and presentations - it was used to create the header of this blog post. ๐Ÿ–ผ๏ธ๐Ÿค–
  • Kagiโ†— is a privacy-focused search engine that provides fast, ad-free, and highly relevant search results. It enhances my web browsing experience by delivering accurate information without the clutter of ads or tracking. ๐Ÿ”๐Ÿ•ต๏ธ
  • Cloudflare Pagesโ†— is a platform for deploying fast and secure static websites. It integrates seamlessly with my development workflow, allowing me to quickly publish and manage my web projects with ease, including this blog and my record collection pageโ†—. ๐ŸŒฉ๏ธ๐Ÿ•ธ๏ธ

Given all the advances in AI at the moment, I wonder how much this list is going to change over the next 12 months !!!! ๐Ÿคฏ๐Ÿ”ฎ

Related Posts

Counting the Cost of Vibe Coding

A local-first dashboard for tracking AI coding tool spend across Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, and Gemini CLI - with a TUI, a desktop app, and zero API keys required.

16 min read
Counting the Cost of Vibe Coding

Introducing AI Commit

A Rust CLI I built to stop writing terrible commit messages - aic generates AI-powered commit messages, PR drafts, diff reviews, and repo visualisations from your staged changes.

10 min read
Introducing AI Commit

Introducing Hosts Butler

A terminal-based hosts file manager built in Rust that I wrote to stop manually editing /etc/hosts with a text editor and hoping I didn't break anything.

6 min read
Introducing Hosts Butler

Comments