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.