As of April 2026: IDE (VSCode + extensions) feels like home, Codex/Claude apps feels like i'm visiting my chaotic relatives.
Ask HN: What is your dev set up like?
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: Ask HN: What is your dev set up like?
#22Lotus Domino Designer, lol.
I am riding this tech into the ground and have been working since 2008, off and on, to shut down anyone who is using it and migrate them to modern platforms. And still getting contracts to do so! I have done your standard modern SaaS gigs as well, but these days I'm finding shutdown efforts of legacy tech is enjoyable work, while playing the startup/SaaS game is not.
Re: Ask HN: What is your dev set up like?
#23Stuck with GoLand. I hate the company, use maybe 5% of the features, but there is nothing better out there.
FileZilla for FTP.
HeidiSQL and MariaDB for SQL.
1Remote for multi-session SSH.
KeePass for passwords, keys, configuration files or any sensitive data.
Occasionally I use Notepad++, VS Codium or Zed when I need to.
Re: Ask HN: What is your dev set up like?
#24[flagged]
Re: Ask HN: What is your dev set up like?
#25I am increasingly switching to Lanes.sh after having been running Claude Code with Github Desktop ytd. Deleted my Pycharm and Vscode a while back.
Re: Ask HN: What is your dev set up like?
#26My own retro 8-bit inspired VT100 terminal emulator called 8btty, mostly running Claude Code, either native build or integrated into the Unreal Engine 5 interface.
Re: Ask HN: What is your dev set up like?
#27i use tmux with one open session per project I'm working on.
inside the session using nvim for edits, terminal panes for running tests / commands etc, and increasingly pi as a coding agent instead of claude code.
i sometimes toy around with orchestration projects like capy.ai or conductor but haven't really been impressed.
probably worth noting that usually all code i push will have been written by me. even if LLMs can output the same i find it's usually faster to implement it myself compared to convincing myself that the LLM output is correct.
Re: Ask HN: What is your dev set up like?
#28I've been coding 100% in Emacs for the past 20+ years, and I don't imagine I'll be changing any time soon. For "AI"? I sometimes paste some code into chatgpt.com and ask for assistance, but I don't have an specific integration setup. I have LSP setup for python, golang, and some smart configurations for YAML, JSON, etc. I have all my work logs in org-mode.
Pretty much the same, but with my Emacs usage being mich recent. Before I was using Vim. I still use IDE for Java, Android, and iOS projects.
Re: Ask HN: What is your dev set up like?
#29Most of the time I use Antigravity and sometimes Cursor
Re: Ask HN: What is your dev set up like?
#30VSCode + Claude Code. The combination works well for solo development — Claude handles the implementation, I handle the architecture and judgment calls.
A few things I've learned:
Tests were important before AI and are even more important now. AI can introduce unintended outcomes in subtle ways, so having a strong test suite isn't optional — it's your safety net against changes you didn't fully review.
Just because you can doesn't mean you should. AI makes it trivially easy to refactor, swap frameworks, rebuild entire modules. But it doesn't mean you should rework everything daily to chase the newest JS framework. Restraint matters more now, not less.
The biggest limitation: AI follows patterns from the most common repos. For standard work that's fine — often it's exactly what you need. But when you hit what I'd call "unsolved problems" — things that don't have an industry-accepted solution yet — AI falls apart. It'll confidently generate something that looks right but isn't. That's where knowing how to plan, prompt with the right context, and recognise when the output is wrong becomes the actual skill.