I was actually pretty happy with my previous setup using Cursor + HyperJS...
But then Elon came
along and as I refuse to support that man, I immediately cancelled and left.
Which means it's time to rethink everything!
How I write software, as of September 2026
After some months of experimentation, I settled on this stack for now:
Editor: Zed
In Zed, everything is so freaking instant!
After Cursor I initially went back to VSCode. It was kinda okay, but autocomplete was slow and quality meh. Code completions, inference and similar was really slow, and it generally just felt sluggish.
Finally, I got enough of it and gave Zed a try - and what a difference!
Everything is snappy, be it code completions, navigation or just booting up. It's like that feeling of getting a new phone/car/bike, where you suddenly realise how you've been enduring for a long time.
Beyond performance, the Zed AI autocomplete (called edit predictions in Zed) works great and has a good balance of speed and quality.
It also has a lot more built-in, and so far I only had to install a few extra extensions:
- Tokyo Night theme (time to try a new theme after years with One Dark Pro)
- Oxc (support of Oxmt and Oxlint)
- MDX (support for writing MDX like this blogpost)
- Rainbow CSV (I often prefer using my editor for handling CSVs ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
- Comments Highlighter (makes those
// TODO: ...stand out)
In VSCode, I had 15+ extensions that I no longer need because Zed already includes what they were doing!
Terminal: Ghostty
I still like having a separate dedicated terminal to keep more screen real estate in my editor.
Ghostty is a fast, fully featured terminal like all the other ones. It just works, it supports modern usage and doesn't try to force the way you work (looking at you Warp).
I was also able to spend too much time on sparkly shader stuff, so when I type it now looks like this:
Ghostty shaders at play
Sadly, I see those sparkles less after I started using Conductor...
AI Manager: Conductor
For a while, I kept juggling terminal tabs with Claude Code and a handful of git woktrees that I alternated between (and struggled to figure our where I was working on what) and eventually I carved in and started using Conductor.
It is pretty great and makes it so much easier to keep an overview of ongoing work across agents and projects. On the negative side it also makes it very easy to spin up new tasks, so it requires advanced human skills at avoiding too much multitasking.