Tech loves trends. Blink and you’ll miss the next must-have tool getting hyped to the moon. But for every actually useful innovation, there are a dozen tools that make noise, look impressive, and then quietly fade into the background—rarely touched, rarely missed.
Let’s call it out. Here are 10 dev tools that sound amazing, dominate conferences and Reddit threads... and still end up collecting digital dust.
Kubernetes
The Prom King of DevOps. It runs the cloud! It scales your pizza tracker! But unless you work at a hyperscaler or DevOps-heavy org, you’re probably just copying Helm charts someone else wrote. Most engineers don't even need it.Notion (for engineering docs)
Everyone loves the aesthetic. And then someone tries to search for a decision made last quarter and ends up six databases deep in a toggle graveyard. Docs need structure, not just vibes.Electron Apps
Cross-platform and cute—until your machine starts wheezing. Everyone talks about building the next Slack or VS Code with Electron, but nobody wants to QA it after the RAM apocalypse.GraphQL
Sounds sleek: get exactly the data you want. Reality: overengineered queries, N+1 bugs, and your frontend team becoming accidental backend maintainers. REST didn’t die. It just went back to work.AI Code Assistants
Cool demos, real promise... but most teams are still doing double-checks on everything it generates. You save time on boilerplate and lose it debugging the “confidence score: 94%” hallucination.Blockchain for Everything
Blockchain! For healthcare! For storage! For version control! For meetings?? The tech isn’t useless, but when you need an actual product instead of a whitepaper, everyone disappears.Low-Code Platforms
Looked revolutionary... until people realized that maintaining logic in drag-and-drop UIs is like playing Jenga with wet spaghetti. Great for MVPs, a nightmare for scale.JAMstack Tools
Gatsby, Netlify, and friends were supposed to be the future. Then you needed real-time features, user accounts, or a CMS... and ended up rebuilding everything in Next.js anyway.Static Site Generators (SSGs)
So hot in the mid-2010s. Then you needed to update content daily and remembered you’d hardcoded everything into Markdown. Shoutout to the devs who turned their personal blog into a full-time refactor.Containerized Local Dev Environments
Sounds clean. Isolation! Repeatability! But if you’ve ever watched someone spend two days debugging a broken Docker volume so they can run npm install, you know the dream doesn’t match the struggle.
Tech loves shiny objects. But usefulness isn’t about noise—it’s about adoption, longevity, and how well a tool integrates into daily workflows.
Some tools rise above the hype. The rest? They go back in the toolbox.
Top comments (4)
I ran a few sites on Sanity and Netlify and It worked great. I didn't have any opportunities to use it again, but for small sites it still is my go to set up.
I introduced containerized local dev evironments in the dev flow of my previous company. I used Lando to make the docker creation easier. If there is a problem with the containers it is possible to do
lando rebuild(resets the containers without the loss of data) andlando destroy(start form scratch).Hey David — appreciate this! 🙌
Totally fair take on Sanity + Netlify. For small projects, that combo does feel like plugging into the future — until you need heavy auth, dynamic content, or client-side chaos. Then it’s: “welp… time to migrate.” Still, it’s hard to beat that initial DX.
As for containerized local dev, shoutout for using Lando — not enough folks give it credit. It’s the “training wheels” Docker deserves. That said, the magic really depends on the team’s comfort level. For some folks, lando rebuild is salvation. For others, even the word “volume” triggers PTSD. 😅
Love hearing how you made it work in production. Proof that with the right setup (and a patient team), even the "dusty" tools still have shine.
You are right the Sanity Netlify combo doesn't work for every application, it is CMS focused.
For me the choice for Lando is more out of laziness. I know how to configure Docker instances. But not everybody does. So a single config and CLI app that takes care of everything makes the threshold lower to fix the container problems. So that is a nice bonus.
There are tools that I think are not worth the time. But there are others that I think don't belong in the list. As you mentioned it is more about how you use them than about a problem with the tool itself.
Curious which tool folks would defend on this list. What’d I get wrong? 👀