So you're about to pick tools for smart contract development. Great. You're also about to step into a minefield of opinions, tribal warfare, and tools that promise the moon but deliver... well, less than the moon.
I've been doing this for 10+ years. Shipped contracts on Ethereum, experimented with Solana, played with Cosmos, and watched countless "revolutionary" tools come and go. Here's what I learned about choosing tools that won't make you want to throw your laptop out the window.
The landscape (it's messier than you think)
First, let's get real about the state of smart contract tooling. There's a whole ecosystem of frameworks, languages, testing suites, and deployment tools. Some are solid. Some are shiny garbage. Most are somewhere in between.
The choices you make early will haunt you later. I've seen teams rewrite entire codebases because they picked the wrong toolchain. Not fun. Expensive. Avoidable.
Start with the language (because everything else flows from here)
Your language choice isn't just about syntax. It's about ecosystems, security models, and how much pain you're willing to endure.
Solidity — the 800-pound gorilla. Everyone knows it. Documentation everywhere. Stack Overflow actually has answers. But here's the thing: Solidity has footguns. Real ones. Storage slot overflows? Yeah, that's a thing that can quietly corrupt your data.
I've written probably 50K+ lines of Solidity. Love-hate relationship. Mostly hate when debugging storage layouts at 3 AM.
Vyper — Solidity's paranoid cousin. More restrictive. Fewer footguns. Also fewer developers who know it. If you want explicit over clever, Vyper's your jam. Just good luck finding devs at a hackathon who can review your code.
Rust-based options (Move, Sway, CosmWasm) — here's where it gets interesting. Rust's safety guarantees are real. The safety-critical Rust discussion shows how serious the language is about preventing bugs at compile time.
I played with CosmWasm 3.0 recently. The composability improvements are legit. But the learning curve? Steep as hell. Your average Solidity dev needs months to get productive.
Move (Sui, Aptos) — resource-oriented programming. No reentrancy bugs by design. Sounds great, right? It is. But it requires rewiring your brain. Sui's composable systems approach is genuinely innovative. It's also genuinely different from everything you know.
My take: Don't chase the shiny new language unless you have a damn good reason. Solidity is boring. Boring is good. But if you're building something new and have time to invest, Rust-based options are worth the pain.
The framework question (Hardhat vs Foundry vs everything else)
This is where developers get religious. Hardhat people vs Foundry people. It's like vim vs emacs but for smart contracts.
Hardhat — JavaScript-based. If your team knows TypeScript, this is the path of least resistance. Plugins for everything. Mature ecosystem. Testing in JavaScript feels... fine.
But here's what drives me crazy: JavaScript testing for contracts that handle money. It works. I use it. But something feels off about testing financial logic in a language that thinks 0.1 + 0.2 !== 0.3.
Foundry — Solidity-native testing. Write tests in Solidity. Blazing fast. Fuzzing built-in. The CLI actually makes sense.
I switched to Foundry last year for new projects. Never looked back. Testing in the same language as your contracts? Game-changer. Fuzz testing that actually finds bugs? Even better.
Downside: smaller ecosystem. Fewer plugins. If you need something niche, you might be writing it yourself.
My framework philosophy
- If your team is full-stack web developers who know JS/TS inside out → Hardhat. The onboarding is smooth.
- If your team is smart contract-first, values speed, and wants Solidity testing → Foundry. The developer experience is superior.
- If you're doing CosmWasm → honestly, the tooling is still maturing. Prepare for some DIY.
Security tools (because audits are expensive and bugs are more expensive)
Here's an uncomfortable truth: no tool catches everything. But some catch enough to save your ass.
Static analyzers:
- Slither — catches obvious bugs, some subtle ones. Free. Use it. Always.
- Mythril — symbolic execution. Slower. Deeper. Worth running before audits.
- Securify — academic tool. Sometimes finds weird edge cases others miss.
I run all three. Why? Because they catch different things. Slither found a reentrancy bug in code that looked fine to me. Mythril caught an integer overflow I missed. Neither is perfect. Together? Pretty good.
Fuzzing:
Foundry's built-in fuzzing is solid for property-based testing. Echidna takes it further — found bugs in my "production-ready" code more times than I'd like to admit.
Pro tip: write invariant tests. "This value should never exceed X" type checks. Fuzzers are shockingly good at breaking your assumptions.
The audit question:
Tools don't replace audits. But they make audits cheaper and faster. Clean up obvious bugs before the auditor sees your code. They'll find the subtle stuff. You'll save money and look less incompetent.
Testing strategy (or: how to sleep at night)
Your testing tools matter less than your testing philosophy.
Unit tests — test individual functions. Boring. Essential. I aim for 90%+ coverage. Not because coverage guarantees correctness, but because it forces you to think through edge cases.
Integration tests — test contract interactions. This is where the interesting bugs hide. That function works fine alone. But when called after that other function? Boom.
Mainnet fork testing — test against actual mainnet state. Essential for DeFi. That Uniswap integration? Test it against real Uniswap contracts with real liquidity. Surprises happen.
Foundry makes fork testing trivial. One of the main reasons I switched.
Scenario testing — walk through user flows. "User deposits, price changes, user withdraws" type scenarios. Catches logic bugs that unit tests miss.
The 3 AM test for testing
Can you run your full test suite, see it pass, and actually trust it? If not, your tests are theater, not validation.
Deployment and monitoring (because shipping is just the beginning)
Your deployment tool needs to be boring and reliable.
Hardhat deploy — works. Keeps track of deployments. Supports upgrades. Not exciting, but gets the job done.
Foundry scripts — more control, more flexibility, more ways to shoot yourself in the foot. I use them for complex deployments where I need fine-grained control.
The critical part nobody talks about: deployment verification.
Always verify on block explorers. Always. Etherscan, BlockScout, whatever. Users need to read your code. You need transparency.
And set up monitoring BEFORE you deploy. Not after. Before.
- Transaction monitoring (detect unusual patterns)
- Event monitoring (know when things happen)
- State monitoring (track critical variables)
I use Tenderly for monitoring. OpenZeppelin Defender is solid too. Pick something. Don't deploy blind.
The composability consideration
Here's where tools get philosophical. Are you building standalone contracts or composable systems?
Sui's composable systems approach is interesting — thinking about contracts as building blocks rather than monolithic apps. CosmWasm has similar ideas.
If you're in this camp, your tool choices shift. You need better testing for interactions between contracts. Better tools for managing dependencies. Better frameworks for standardization.
Traditional Solidity tooling assumes relatively isolated contracts. Modern DeFi? Everything composes with everything. Your tools need to handle that complexity.
The migration path (because you WILL change tools)
Controversial take: assume you'll switch tools eventually.
New tools emerge. Better practices develop. Your needs change.
So don't lock yourself in. Keep your business logic separate from framework-specific code. Use interfaces. Make your tests portable.
I've migrated projects from Truffle to Hardhat to Foundry. Each time, portable tests saved my ass. Each time, tightly coupled code caused pain.
My actual tool stack (as of February 2026)
For Ethereum/EVM stuff:
- Development: Foundry (with Hardhat for specific integrations)
- Testing: Foundry + Echidna for fuzzing
- Security: Slither + Mythril + manual review
- Deployment: Foundry scripts + Hardhat deploy (depends on complexity)
- Monitoring: Tenderly
- Node provider: Alchemy (with Infura as backup)
For CosmWasm experiments:
- Development: CosmWasm 3.0 tooling
- Testing: Rust's built-in test framework + multi-test
- Still figuring out: The best deployment/monitoring story
For Move/Sui playing around:
- Development: Sui CLI
- Testing: Sui test framework
- Honestly: Still early days, tooling is improving fast
The questions you should ask before choosing
Forget feature lists. Ask these:
Can your team actually use this? The best tool you can't operate is worse than the mediocre tool you master.
Does it catch the bugs that matter? Security tools that find theoretical issues but miss practical bugs are useless.
Will it slow you down or speed you up? Some tools have high upfront costs but save time later. Others just slow you down forever.
What's the community like? When you're stuck at 2 AM, can you find help? Active Discord? Recent GitHub issues? Or crickets?
How stable is it? Bleeding edge is fun until it breaks your deployment pipeline before an audit deadline.
What's the exit strategy? If this tool dies or becomes unsuitable, how hard is migration?
The mistakes I see repeatedly
Mistake 1: Choosing tools for resume-building
"Let's use the newest framework!" Cool. Also, your team can't ship because they're still learning.
Mistake 2: Ignoring the maintenance burden
That custom tool suite looks great. Until you're the only person who can maintain it.
Mistake 3: Skimping on security tooling
"We'll just be careful." Famous last words before a $5M exploit.
Mistake 4: Over-optimizing too early
Fancy optimization tools for a contract that handles $1K? Probably overkill.
Mistake 5: Trusting tools blindly
Tools find bugs. They also miss bugs. And sometimes flag non-bugs. Use your brain.
What actually matters
After shipping dozens of contracts and trying probably every tool that exists:
Reliability beats features. The boring tool that works beats the exciting tool that sometimes works.
Team familiarity beats theoretical superiority. A team productive in Hardhat ships faster than a team learning Foundry. Eventually Foundry wins, but "eventually" matters.
Security tooling is non-negotiable. This isn't negotiable. Budget for it. Use it. Don't be the project that gets exploited because you skipped Slither.
Testing matters more than tools. Amazing test suite with mediocre tools > mediocre tests with amazing tools.
Composability is the future. Tools that assume isolated contracts are becoming legacy. Think systems, not apps.
The bottom line
There's no perfect tool stack. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Pick tools that:
- Your team can actually use
- Catch bugs that matter
- Won't break your deployment at 3 AM
- Have an active community
- Fit your security requirements
Start conservative. The mainstream stack exists for a reason — it works. As you learn, experiment with newer tools. But keep your experiments in testnet until you're confident.
And remember: tools are tools. They don't write secure code. They don't design good architecture. They don't make good decisions at 3 AM.
You do.
Choose tools that help you do that job better. Everything else is noise.
Stay decentralized, friends. And for the love of Satoshi, run Slither before you deploy.
— Alex "ChainBreaker" Morrison
P.S. By the time you read this, three new tools will have launched promising to solve all your problems. They won't. Use Slither.
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