The tools I use every day, and why. Most of them are boring on purpose: I would rather spend my attention on the work than on the setup.
Machine#
- MacBook Air: one machine for everything, from lodos.md to this site. Light enough to come along to the sailing club.
Editor and terminal#
- VS Code: where the code gets written and read.
- Claude Code: AI pair programming in the terminal, for refactors, reviews and the chores that would otherwise eat an afternoon.
- zsh, with fnm for Node versions and pnpm for packages.
- Homebrew for everything else, and gh for GitHub from the terminal.
Stack#
- TypeScript, Next.js and React for products.
- Python (async) for services and workers.
- PostgreSQL with Prisma on servers; SQLite where the data lives on the user’s own device, as it does in lodos.md.
- Astro for this site.
Infrastructure#
- Cloudflare Pages for this site: static files, deployed by GitHub Actions once every check passes.
- Hetzner servers running Coolify, behind Cloudflare, for lodos.md.
- Docker images, built the same way everywhere.
- GitHub for code and reviews, GitHub Actions for the checks that run before anything ships.
Notes and writing#
- Obsidian and plain Markdown for my own notes; the lodos.md wiki for what the company knows.
- Essays go up on the lodos.md blog, and shorter things here.
AI#
- Claude Code, above.
- lodos.md’s own agents: lodos.md is built with its own AI team, through the same propose-and-approve loop it gives its users. Nothing an agent writes becomes canonical until I approve the diff.
Away from the screen#
- A Spotify library of rock and Anatolian rock: music.
- An ILCA dinghy and a lot of open water: into the wind.
- A shelf of Stoics and strategy: reading.
Missing something you’d like to know about? Write to sam@samye.li.