frontpage.

Hello, happy Friday!

I am looking to do some in-person "developer boot-up" workshops, and seek your suggestions for "modern tooling".

The background of the participants range from motivated newbie ("I heard you can make your own app with AI!") to existing software developers who want to get up to speed on modern development for the purposes of building stuff, and getting jobs where AI tools are being used.

For those who have been doing software development & "tech" lately using AI tools, and feel they have a great setup & flow - I would love to hear what your dev setup is, what tools you're using and what workflow has been working best for you (and your team).

// My Background

I have been programming / building for 20+ years, but have not been using AI tools much (aside from hitting up LLM APIs on a few projects).

I value open-source, and aim for long-term quality and supportability. Techniques like test-driven development (TDD), using proven / well documented tools, customer-centric development (often pairing with clients), make it easy to do the right thing. If you are familiar with Pivotal Labs, agile & XP - that's the style.

These are some of the Upcoming uses-cases for the workshop, and my own personal "IT backlog":

- Create a static "one pager" personal/professional website

- Setup a Blog / Static site generator (Pelican), create a simple but stylish theme

- Create a simple web app / backend API (FastAPI) tool - form-based calculator, convert X data to PDFs, etc.

- Figure out how to have SyncThing autosync the home folder of 3 Linux computers in the house

- Backup & archive the photos & video from my iPhone

// Tech stack I am currently using:

- Operating system: Linux Mint Debian (LMDE)

- Editor: VSCodium

- Code: Python, HTML/CSS

- Server platform: Amazon AWS

I am guessing that most workshop participants will be using MacBooks & Windows computers - but a few are on Linux, as I recently did a "Linux install party".

I haven't used any "AI harnesses", agents or anything like that - but curious what's a good starting point to take best advantage of these tools.

Thanks for sharing the knowledge!

// JRO

I am like you were late to the AI party, and still find it hard to give up on coding and let the AI do everything, however i learned to trust the AI a little in the past few months.

OpenCode + their Go subscription.

Start with a nice batteries included setup, read anthropic's knowledge share, play and iterate, stay human in the loop.

Check out Dax Raad (behind OC) on the Pragmatic Engineer podcast, I think you will like his philosophies, I sure do.

MacOS, Ghostty, Neovim, Pi (with a fair bit of customization to each). I'm relatively new to Pi after using Codex pretty heavily, but it's nice to be able to customize things to how I want.

Lead Dev for a Security Company with a very strict AI policy.

Mostly Hand coded, using an agent in the browser (Claude / Corporate ChatGPT account) when necessary. I am aware we will fall behind using this methodology and have advocated for change, but I suppose it comes with the territory.

I don't think it's clear you'll fall behind. Your competitors could very well be vibe coding themselves into messes they will never recover from.

I have a vibe coded script which creates a git worktree + zellij pane with a specific layout + a virtualenv per feature.

The zellij layout includes panes for OpenCode, a shell, a neovim, inotify tests, etc.

I switch between zellij sessions during refills.

I feel it’s important that this should be mentioned at least once in a thread like this: none. I choose to program the old-fashioned way, and do not anticipate this changing in the foreseeable future, and believe that I’ll cope just fine in my niche; and if it becomes commercially unviable, well, I may no longer be interested in the field anyway.

I won’t go into any details on why here, because that would make it too much about me. There have been plenty of discussions of reasons, trade-offs, &c. Plenty of people are rejecting this stuff, for a wide variety of reasons.

But one thing I will say: if I were teaching someone to program, I would actively discourage them entirely from using AI stuff, even though it will seem to help. (I mean someone that wants to learn programming, not someone that just wants results and is not interested in programming as such.)

Cool!

This thread is meant for people who use AI, though.

Claude code + very opinionated type script. Try to push as much as possible as far left in the SDLF (types -> lint rules -> tests -> md) and try to improve the dev ex after every single PR.

I’m already doing this with my school (givedirection.com) and you’re gonna have a hard time nailing this down because there’s no two similar set ups

Especially along the range of newbie to expert it’s extremely variable and you’re not gonna be able to pick one that rules them all

I would suggest you revamp your approach and have different courses for different types of people I had to split my course into a basic and an advanced and they are extremely different

Even within the advanced course fairly simple stuff like hosting your own LLMs seems to really be a stretch for a lot of people

I'm a bit of a fanboy, but exe.dev + their Shelley web agent is pretty great

I wrote my own tooling around the raw LLMs:

I can tick files in Vim, those get concatenated into a prompt. Along with a feature request. Plus my "rules for good code" file, plus one rule file per language involved, plus a project specific overview file. The LLM then answers with a list of changes it wants to make to the code. My tooling then applies those changes and I look at them via "git diff". If I like it, I commit. If not, I change one of the prompts and start the process again.

I described the beginnings of this workflow last July:

https://www.gibney.org/prompt_coding

Feels like an eternity ago. I think I will write a new blog post this July and describe how the workflow has evolved over the past year.

My stack is really boring, just VSCode + Ghostty and Claude Code team plan (premium seat).

Stanford University offered the course "CS146S: The Modern Software Developer" in Fall 2025. Check it out if interested. https://themodernsoftware.dev/

Something different that other folks might not have thought of: Robust multi-environment infra deploy scripts that leverage terraform + AWS SSO

I've found that converting stuff that's previously been very ops-cli heavy into very detailed skills has worked really really well.

I use Claude Opus 4.8 + Conductor as my daily driver

Suppression of the integrated stress response extends lifespan in the fly

Software Engineering is the new Manufacturing Engineering

Building Xbox Games with Godot: A New Sample to Get You Started Faster

AI must foster 'maternal instincts' or we risk extinction, warns Geoffrey Hinton

U.S. attorney says election fraud probes are underway in California

A healthier gut may be key to cancer care

The largest cannabis study ever: It may make anxiety, depression and PTSD worse

pg_durable: Microsoft open sources in-database durable execution

Machine-verified proof that M3P ∈ P and P = NP via Pedigree Polytopes

Public transport network partially shut–down bosses forgot to pay internet bill

Here's why I created a travel website for robots

Tips to get the most out of OpenCode

Flood of AI 'garbage' is pushing open-source developers to the limit

Configuration flags are where software goes to rot

CrankGPT: A human-powered local and private AI solution

Show HN: Group of Death – WorldCup bracket predictor with shareable URLs

FeOS: A 16-Bit OS Written in ASM (and a custom language)

Neural-somatic simulations of history's greatest minds

Understanding why autism symptoms sometimes improve amid fever

</> Htmx – Code is Cheap(er)

The circus freaks of open source

The round-the-world escape from Pearl Harbor

SignalScout

My thoughts on the "focusgroup" attribute proposal

A curated list of AI for developers

Stop Using Conventional Commits

Federal audit reveals NIST's NVD is plagued by poor planning and duplication

AI investment 2nd round, from GPU to power·industrial goods·space

What Dot.com Bandwidth Taught Me About the AI Token Cost Panic

MCemm a GEMM (General Matrix Multiply) Kernel Generato

Ask HN: What is your (AI) dev tech stack / workflow? (June 2026)

Comments