All tests run on an 8-year-old MacBook Air. All results from shipping 7 Mac apps as a solo developer. No sponsored opinion.
Not a listicle of everything possible. Just what I actually open every day.
Editor: VS Code with specific extensions
rust-analyzer: non-negotiable. Inline type hints, error detection, jump to definition. Rust without rust-analyzer is painful.
Continue: local LLM autocomplete via Ollama. Handles boilerplate and repetitive patterns without API calls.
Even Better TOML: Cargo.toml syntax and validation. Small but useful.
Tauri: official Tauri extension with command palette integration.
AI: three tools, different jobs
Ollama + qwen2.5-coder:1.5b: autocomplete. Runs locally. Never leaves the machine.
Gemini: quick questions, syntax lookups, anything where speed matters more than depth. Free tier covers daily use.
Claude: hard Rust bugs, architecture decisions, anything where being wrong is expensive. Free tier for targeted use.
Terminal: iTerm2
Default macOS Terminal works. iTerm2's split panes are useful when running npm run tauri dev alongside a shell for ADB commands.
Version control: Git + GitHub
Commit before handing off to AI tools. This saved me twice when AI tools made silent regressions — I could diff against the last commit and see exactly what changed.
The rule: never let AI touch code that isn't committed.
Debugging: browser DevTools + RUST_LOG
Tauri apps have a WebView. Cmd+Option+I opens DevTools in dev mode. Frontend bugs debugged exactly like a web app.
Backend: RUST_LOG=debug npm run tauri dev shows Rust log output in the terminal.
Design: minimal
I'm not a designer. For UI, I use Tailwind CSS utility classes and reference existing Mac app conventions. I don't use Figma.
For app icons — my weakest point — I iterate on simple concepts and accept "good enough." The icon isn't the product.
What I don't use
- A project management tool (GitHub Issues is enough)
- A staging environment (the app runs locally by definition)
- A CI/CD pipeline (manual builds, notarize before each release)
- A documentation platform (README + dev.to articles)
Solo dev means every tool has to justify its overhead. Most don't.
TL;DR: My daily stack as a solo Rust + Tauri dev: VS Code with rust-analyzer, three-tier AI (Ollama locally, Gemini for quick lookups, Claude for hard bugs), iTerm2, and Git with a strict "commit before AI" rule. No Figma, no CI/CD, no project management tool — if it can't justify its overhead, it's out.
If this was useful, a ❤️ helps more than you'd think — thanks!
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