The one that earned its place in my setup and writes zero code: a status line that shows model, directory, git branch, and a dirty-file count.
Sounds trivial. It isn't. Almost every genuinely bad mistake I've made in a terminal came from being confidently wrong about which branch or which directory I was in. Having it always on screen has caught me more times than any linter.
Second one, same spirit: a script that runs at shell/session start and prints the repo's state — branch, uncommitted count, last five commits, and the test command it detected from package.json or the Makefile. I wrote it for an AI agent, so it would stop burning three commands rediscovering the repo every time. Turns out I read it more than the agent does. Walking into a repo you left two weeks ago and having the last five commits already on screen removes a real chunk of friction.
Third: jq. Not a dev tool exactly, but the amount of my life that is "get one field out of a JSON blob" is embarrassing.
The pattern across all three is that none of them do anything clever. They just put a fact in front of me at the moment I would otherwise have guessed. That's most of the value — cheap facts, delivered before the guess.
The one that earned its place in my setup and writes zero code: a status line that shows model, directory, git branch, and a dirty-file count.
Sounds trivial. It isn't. Almost every genuinely bad mistake I've made in a terminal came from being confidently wrong about which branch or which directory I was in. Having it always on screen has caught me more times than any linter.
Second one, same spirit: a script that runs at shell/session start and prints the repo's state — branch, uncommitted count, last five commits, and the test command it detected from package.json or the Makefile. I wrote it for an AI agent, so it would stop burning three commands rediscovering the repo every time. Turns out I read it more than the agent does. Walking into a repo you left two weeks ago and having the last five commits already on screen removes a real chunk of friction.
Third: jq. Not a dev tool exactly, but the amount of my life that is "get one field out of a JSON blob" is embarrassing.
The pattern across all three is that none of them do anything clever. They just put a fact in front of me at the moment I would otherwise have guessed. That's most of the value — cheap facts, delivered before the guess.