DEV Community: Ayush Kunkulol

My Developer Stack in 2026: The Tools I Use Every Day

Ayush Kunkulol — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 19:09:28 +0000

Every month, dozens of new developer tools promise to make us 10x more productive.

Some disappear within weeks.

Others become part of your daily workflow.

Instead of listing every trending tool, I want to share the stack I actually use to build modern web applications in 2026.

These are the tools I rely on every day.

💻 Visual Studio Code

VS Code is still my primary code editor.

It has everything I need:

Excellent TypeScript support

Huge extension ecosystem

Fast performance

Integrated Git

Built-in debugging

Terminal support

I've tried other editors, but VS Code remains the most balanced choice for my workflow.

🚀 Antigravity IDE & CLI

One of the newer additions to my toolkit is Antigravity.

I use both the IDE and the CLI because they integrate AI directly into my development workflow.

Instead of constantly switching between my editor and a browser, I can generate code, refactor components, and solve problems without leaving the terminal or IDE.

For repetitive tasks, it saves a surprising amount of time.

🤖 Claude

Claude has become my go-to AI assistant.

I don't use it to blindly generate code.

Instead, I use it to:

Review architecture

Explain unfamiliar code

Debug difficult issues

Refactor large files

Brainstorm implementation ideas

Learn new technologies faster

It's less about replacing development and more about accelerating it.

⚡ TypeScript

If I had to choose one language for modern web development, it would be TypeScript.

The static type system catches bugs before they reach production.

As projects grow, TypeScript makes refactoring significantly safer and improves collaboration across teams.

Once you become comfortable with it, going back to plain JavaScript feels limiting.

⚛️ React

React continues to be my preferred frontend library.

Its component-based architecture makes building scalable user interfaces much easier.

Combined with TypeScript, React provides an excellent developer experience for both small and large applications.

⚡ Vite

Waiting for development servers to start is a thing of the past.

Vite provides:

Instant startup

Fast Hot Module Replacement (HMR)

Lightweight configuration

Excellent React support

It's one of those tools you quickly stop thinking about because it just works.

🌐 HTML, CSS & JavaScript

Despite all the frameworks available today, the fundamentals remain essential.

Understanding HTML, CSS, and JavaScript is still the foundation of frontend development.

Frameworks evolve.

Core web technologies stay relevant.

The better you understand the basics, the easier it becomes to learn any new framework.

🗄 MySQL

For relational data, MySQL continues to be my database of choice.

It's reliable, well-documented, and suitable for everything from personal projects to production applications.

Most web applications don't require exotic databases.

A well-designed MySQL schema is often all you need.

Why I Keep My Stack Simple :

I don't chase every new framework.

I prefer mastering a small set of tools that work well together.

My current stack looks like this:

VS Code
Antigravity IDE & CLI
Claude
TypeScript
React
Vite
HTML
CSS
JavaScript
MySQL
Git & GitHub

This stack lets me build modern, scalable web applications without unnecessary complexity.

Final Thoughts :

The best developer stack isn't the one with the most tools—it's the one that helps you build consistently.

Every new tool has a learning curve, and switching constantly can hurt productivity more than it helps.

Master the fundamentals. Choose tools that solve real problems. Keep your workflow simple.

That's the approach I'm taking in 2026.

What's in your developer stack this year? I'd love to hear which tools have become indispensable for you.

I built an AI lawyer that actually cites the Indian Constitution. Meet LexByte.

Ayush Kunkulol — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 14:16:55 +0000

So a few days ago I shipped Klyro AI. Wrote the launch post, got the LinkedIn validation hit, moved on. And I mean moved on — like, the same week, because that's just how my project list works. 50+ projects before I'm done with college isn't a number I get to be precious about. It only means something if I keep shipping.

But this next one wasn't planned the way Klyro was. It started kind of annoying, actually.

I was trying to settle some random argument — can't even remember what, something about a President's ordinance power — and I went down the usual rabbit hole. Three Quora answers that contradicted each other. A law school PDF from probably 2014. A "legal explainer" site that was 80% ads and 20% nothing. And the whole time I'm thinking: the actual answer is sitting in the Constitution itself. 395 articles, 22 parts, public document, free to read. Nobody's hiding this from me.

Except nobody reads a 395-article document to settle one argument. That's the actual gap. Not "people don't know their rights" in some abstract sense — it's that the source of truth exists and is completely unusable in practice.

That annoyance turned into LexByte AI Lawyer.

🔗 Live: https://lexbyte-ai-lawyer.web.app/

What it does

Two things, and I kept it to two on purpose.

First, you can just ask it stuff. Plain language, no legal Latin required. "Explain Article 21 like I'm not a law student." "What's the basic structure doctrine." "Fundamental Rights vs Directive Principles, what's actually different." It answers in a structured way and points back to the specific Articles it's pulling from — it's not supposed to just sound confident, it's supposed to show its work.

Second, there's a full searchable database of the Constitution itself. By Part — Fundamental Rights, Directive Principles, Emergency Provisions, all of it. Search by article number, title, or keyword. Sometimes you don't want a conversation, you just want to go straight to Article 21 and read it yourself. Both modes exist because both are real use cases.

I also spent more time than I'd like to admit on the UI being calm. Glassmorphism, soft, almost like a counsel's office rather than a search engine. Legal stuff is already stressful for most people — the interface's whole job is to not add to that.

Why I picked something this specific

I could've made a "general AI lawyer for everything everywhere," and it would've been worse on day one than LexByte is right now. Here's the thing nobody tells you when you start these projects: a narrow tool that's actually right beats a broad tool that's occasionally right, every single time, especially in law.

The Constitution is a closed corpus. Finite. 395 articles. That's a problem I can actually solve well instead of gesturing at solving. And honestly — if a legal AI tool makes up an article number, that's not a "minor inaccuracy," that's the entire product failing at the one job it had. So getting answers grounded in real text, not just plausible-sounding text, was the actual hard part of this build. Not the chat UI. The trust part.

Where it actually is right now, no sugarcoating

It's a static site right now — HTML, CSS, vanilla JS, Firebase Hosting. No backend spinning, no install, just a link. I'm not training or fine-tuning any model here — that was never the plan. I'm using an LLM API for the actual language understanding and reasoning, and feeding it structured knowledge of the Constitution as context, so it's answering from the real article text instead of whatever it half-remembers from training data. Currently the corpus has 179+ articles indexed and I'm working toward the full 395. That's the part that makes the citations real instead of decorative — the model isn't guessing what Article 21 says, it's being handed the actual text.

It's intentionally simple right now. I'd rather launch the smaller, correct version and grow it in public than launch something that sounds impressive and falls apart on the third question. The roadmap's where the ambition actually lives:

Case law — Supreme Court and High Court judgments, not just the Constitution
Real citation generation
Multi-language support, because rights shouldn't require fluency in English
AI contract review and document analysis
A proper personalized research workspace
PDF export for whatever you're working on

Who I actually built this for

Law students cross-referencing provisions at 1am before an exam. Paralegals doing the boring-but-necessary prelim research. Teachers who want students to actually engage with constitutional structure instead of zoning out at a textbook. And just regular people — most of us genuinely don't know what our Fundamental Rights say until we're standing somewhere needing them.

One thing I'm not going to soften: this is not a lawyer. The disclaimer stays visible in every session on purpose — this is legal information, not legal advice, and that line doesn't move for anyone.

What's next

LexByte's MIT-licensed, so if you want to dig into the article corpus, the search layer, or eventually case law integration, the door's open. This is project 13 out of 23 on my roadmap — next up is the heavier system-design stuff, a mini browser, a full browser engine, a mini IDE. I'll keep posting as things ship, same as always.

If you've actually built grounded AI retrieval over structured legal or regulatory text before, I want to hear how you approached it — drop it in the comments, I'm not above stealing good ideas.

Try it: https://lexbyte-ai-lawyer.web.app/

I built a real-time Air Quality Index monitor from scratch — AtmoPulse 🌍

Ayush Kunkulol — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 22:03:09 +0000

Hey everyone!

I'm a fullstack development learner and I just finished building one of my most ambitious projects entirely from scratch — no templates, no copied code and used AI tools for the compatibility of the Webapp. I'm really proud of how it turned out and would love to share it with the dev community!

It's called AtmoPulse — a real-time Air Quality Index (AQI) monitor for cities worldwide, built with a modern dark UI and interactive map.

🔗 Live Link : https://atmopulse.web.app
🔗 GitHub : https://github.com/itsAyush5/Project-9-AtmoPulse

What is AtmoPulse ?

Air quality is something most of us ignore until it becomes a problem. I wanted to build something actually useful — an app where anyone can search any city and instantly see how clean or polluted the air is, along with a detailed breakdown of what's in it.

✨ Features :

🗺️ Interactive dark map with glow-effect AQI markers (Leaflet.js)
🔍 City search with live autocomplete suggestions
📊 Detailed pollutant panel — PM2.5, PM10, O₃, NO₂, CO, SO₂ and more
🌤️ Live weather data — Temperature, Humidity, Wind, Pressure
📈 Session AQI trend chart with sparkline visualization
🔔 Custom AQI alerts with push notification support
🕘 Search history with quick re-search
👤 Google Sign-In + Email/Password authentication (Firebase)
🏭 Multi-source data — WAQI + OpenAQ APIs combined
📱 Fully responsive — works on mobile and desktop
⚡ Real-time refresh with cooldown timer

🛠️ Tech Stack

Technology Purpose
React 18 Frontend framework
Vite Build tool
Leaflet.js Interactive map
Firebase Hosting
WAQI + OpenAQ APIs Live AQI data
Google OAuth Authentication

😤 Challenges I Faced :

This is the part nobody talks about but honestly the most valuable part of building a project.

Combining two different APIs
WAQI and OpenAQ both return AQI data but in completely different formats. Getting them to work together and display consistently on the same map took a lot of trial and error. I had to write a normalization layer to map both responses into a single data structure.
Leaflet.js + React
Leaflet was originally built for vanilla JS, so integrating it cleanly into a React component lifecycle was tricky. Managing map instance references with useRef and avoiding duplicate map initialization took me a while to figure out.
Firebase Authentication
Setting up both Google Sign-In and Email/Password auth together, and then protecting certain features (like API key management) behind auth state was more complex than I expected. Learning how Firebase's onAuthStateChanged works and persisting auth state across refreshes was a big lesson.
TypeScript learning curve
Coming from JavaScript, TypeScript felt frustrating at first — especially typing API responses where the shape wasn't always predictable. But it saved me from so many bugs that I would have spent hours debugging otherwise.

💡 What I Learned :

How to work with multiple external APIs and normalize their data
Managing complex state in React with TypeScript
Firebase authentication flows and security rules
Integrating map libraries into React properly
Building a fully responsive dark UI from scratch

What's Next ?

I'm planning to add historical AQI data charts and possibly city comparison features. Would love to hear what features you'd find most useful!

Feedback Welcome!

This is one of my biggest projects so far and I'd genuinely appreciate any feedback — whether it's about the code structure, TypeScript usage, UI/UX, or anything else. Don't hold back! 🙏

🔗 Live Link : https://atmopulse.web.app
🔗 GitHub : https://github.com/itsAyush5/Project-9-AtmoPulse