Tools – A Practical Guide
Daily Drivers
These are the ones I've used most and know best. I built this site with them, and they're what I reach for when I start anything new.
Claude Code →
AI CodingMy main coding partner. It scaffolds features, hunts down obscure TypeScript errors, and holds enough of the codebase in its head that I can think out loud instead of context-switching. I reach for it before I reach for a search engine.
Claude →
AI ChatWhere I think out loud when I'm not coding. Drafts, briefs, hard emails. Extended thinking mode is the part I rely on most: I get to watch the reasoning before I commit to a direction.
GitHub →
DeploymentThe backbone. Every change to this site goes through a branch, a PR, and a review checklist before it ships. Issues, CI runs, and the deploy pipeline to Vercel all live here too.
Vercel →
DeploymentWhere this site actually lives. Push a branch, get a preview URL; merge to main, ship to production. Zero config for Next.js, and preview URLs are how I show work-in-progress without standing up a staging environment.
Nano Banana →
Image GenerationMy image generation tool of choice for site visuals and one-off graphics. The prompt-to-result loop is quick, and the outputs hold up at the small sizes the pixel-brutalist layout uses.
Worth Knowing About
I don't use these. They came up while I was working out what to use, and they're the ones people reach for instead. If your workflow already lives somewhere else, start here rather than copying mine.
Cursor →
AI CodingVS Code with AI completion built in. Best fit for engineers who want inline tab-completion that understands the surrounding codebase, without leaving the editor.
ChatGPT →
AI ChatOpenAI's chat assistant. Different ecosystem, different strengths. The plugin and custom-GPT layer makes it the natural choice when a workflow already lives inside OpenAI tooling.
Midjourney →
Image GenerationHigh-fidelity image generation with a Discord-based workflow. Strong for art-directed visuals where style consistency matters more than speed.
Figma →
DesignIndustry-standard UI design tool. The default for handing off layouts and design systems between designers and developers.
v0 →
DesignVercel's AI component generator. Useful for going from a prompt to a working React + Tailwind starting point, particularly on Next.js projects.
Notion →
WritingBlock-based docs and project planning. Best fit for teams that want a single tool for wiki, tasks, and shared notes.
Obsidian →
WritingLocal-first markdown notes with a deep plugin ecosystem. Suited to people who want their knowledge graph to live as plain files on their own machine.