Productivity

After twenty years in web development, I’ve realized that the most dangerous thing in our industry isn’t a security vulnerability or a system outage—it’s creeping complexity. We are conditioned to believe that a more sophisticated setup equals a more professional output. We stack layers of abstraction until we can no longer see the foundation of our own applications.

I spent the first decade of my career as a “maximalist.” I wanted the flashiest IDE, the most complex build pipelines, and the latest alpha-version frameworks. But eventually, the weight of that tooling became a burden. I was spending 40% of my time fighting my environment rather than shipping code.

AI Has Entered the Building

In 2026, the question is no longer “Will AI change software development?” but “How effectively are you using it?” AI tools have moved from experimental novelties to indispensable force multipliers. However, the sheer volume of tools—LLMs, IDE extensions, CLI wrappers, and autonomous agents—has created a paradox of choice.

This guide isn’t about the hype. It’s a pragmatic look at the current AI stack for developers, how to build a workflow that actually saves time, and where the “hidden costs” of AI adoption lie.

Oftentimes, when you buy a new PC, it comes preloaded with applications. Some of them are essential, like an anti-virus, and some of them are not. Over the years I’ve come to realize that the responsiveness of your device (it doesn’t necessarily have to be a computer, it can be a mobile phone or a tablet, too) depends on how many applications you have installed. This digital minimalism approach to performance optimization is especially true for mobile devices, where applications are often started at boot and remain in the memory even if they are not used, draining battery power.

My general rule is to always ask myself if I am really going to use the app I am about to install very often or just occasionally. If the answer is: “No, I don’t really need this app.”, I don’t install it no matter how great the hype is over it.

Eye comfort is very important, especially to programmers, who spend most of their day looking at code in their favorite editor. This programming productivity tip can significantly improve your coding experience and reduce eye strain during long development sessions.

I’ve already mentioned a few themes I like, and today I am going to teach you how to set your editor up in such away that the theme changes automatically depending on what time of day it is. This developer tools automation can greatly enhance your coding comfort throughout different lighting conditions.

For a long time I have been a big fan of Sarah Drasner’s theme for Visual Studio Code, and even used a port of it in Visual Studio 2019 Community Edition.

Ever since I’ve started learning .Net Framework on both Linux and Windows, I ’ve also started using the default Visual Studio 2019 theme in both the IDE, and the editor. Simply because I like unity across the developer tools I use.