A few years ago I was always looking for one tool that could do everything. The perfect IDE setup, the perfect extension pack, the perfect dashboard with every feature imaginable.
Now my toolbox is moving in the opposite direction.
I find myself reaching for tiny utilities that solve one problem well and then disappear. A command runs, prints what I need, and gets out of the way. No accounts, no onboarding, no workspace setup, no UI asking me to click through five screens before I can do something that should take ten seconds.
Maybe it's just fatigue.
Modern development already involves enough moving pieces. Between CI pipelines, package managers, containers, cloud providers, editors, browsers, terminals, and AI assistants, there are plenty of places where complexity is justified. I don't need another layer of abstraction unless it genuinely removes work.
I've also noticed that AI fits surprisingly well into this philosophy. I don't necessarily want it sitting beside me generating code all day. Sometimes I just want to ask it one very specific question, get an answer, and continue working. That interaction feels much more natural than trying to hand over an entire development session.
There's also something satisfying about tools that compose well. A small script feeding another command, which pipes into something else, feels easier to reason about than one application trying to own my entire workflow.
Maybe this is just another swing of the pendulum. We spent years bundling everything together, and now we're slowly rediscovering the value of focused tools.
I don't think every developer will end up there, but I've definitely stopped measuring software by the length of its feature list.
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