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setup 2 min read

My Dev Environment

The stack behind the stack — every tool, editor, and workflow that powers my daily development.

I get asked about my setup a lot. Here’s the full picture — only the things I actually care about.

The Machine

MacBook Pro, M3 Pro, 18 GB RAM. I’ve never heard the fans.

Terminal

Ghostty is the terminal. GPU-accelerated, fast, beautiful, nothing else comes close. I’ve tried iTerm, Warp, Hyper — Ghostty wins.

Shell is Zsh with Oh My Zsh and Powerlevel10k. P10k gives me a fast, clean prompt without getting in the way. The plugins I actually use: git for aliases, zsh-autosuggestions for ghost text from history, zsh-syntax-highlighting for instant typo feedback, and web-search so I can google from the terminal.

alias cc="claude"

That alias gets used more than anything else on my machine.

Editor

Zed. Rust-based, opens instantly, feels native. Multi-cursor editing is best-in-class. I don’t need much else from an editor — Zed gives me speed and stays out of the way.

Claude Code

Can’t live without it. It’s not a nice-to-have anymore, it’s infrastructure.

Opus as the default model, always-thinking on, effort set to high, dangerous mode enabled.

Codex

Codex is the other half of my AI workflow. I use it for longer-running tasks — things I want to kick off and come back to. Claude Code for the interactive stuff, Codex for the async stuff. Between the two, I rarely write code from scratch anymore.

Languages

Bun is the center of gravity. Runtime, bundler, package manager, test runner — it does everything and it’s absurdly fast. Node is there when I need compatibility, but Bun is the default.

bun install    # 10x faster than npm
bun run dev    # instant
bun test       # built-in

Rust for when performance matters. Systems-level work, CLI tools, anything that needs to be fast and correct.

Swift for native macOS and iOS — I’m building Nook Browser in SwiftUI, so Swift is a daily driver.

Apps

Arc The browser. Nothing else compares. Ghostty The terminal. Raycast Replaced Spotlight years ago. Figma Design. Notion Everything else. Cap Screen recording, perfected. Docker Containerization.

Raycast deserves a mention — it’s the glue between everything. Extensions for size conversion, ratio calculation, shadcn-svelte docs, IMDB lookup, spell checking. I can’t imagine using a Mac without it.

Cap is the screen recording tool I wish existed years ago. Open source, beautiful, instant sharing. It replaced Loom for me entirely.

Creative

Final Cut Pro for video. Nothing else on Mac touches it for speed — the magnetic timeline, background rendering, ProRes support. When I need CLI-level control, ffmpeg handles everything Final Cut can’t: format conversion, batch processing, extracting frames, compressing for web.

ffmpeg -i input.mov -c:v libx264 -crf 23 -preset medium output.mp4

Privacy & Networking

The full Proton stack — VPN, Mail, Drive, Authenticator. I don’t trust anyone else with my data.

Tailscale connects all my devices into a mesh network. SSH into my desktop from my laptop, access dev servers from my phone — it just works, zero config.

MacBook Pro M3 Pro. Ghostty + Zsh + P10k. Zed. Bun. Claude Code with Opus and a custom notch display. Cap, Arc, Raycast. Proton + Tailscale. That’s it.

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