Ask HN: What dev tools do you rely on that nobody talks about?
Curious to find those hidden gems that boost productivity or make dev work more efficient. Mired in my own processes and need a change/shift. I'm hoping there's still some non-AI stuff out there that's delightful to use (in a nerdy sense).
https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb (performant database that lets you directly query JSON, parquet, csv files with SQL queries and convert one to the other.
https://github.com/eradman/entr (rerun commands automatically when provided files change) (useful for rerunning test commands automatically once you save the file you're editing.
https://github.com/jdx/mise (fast asdf, direnv, and task runner replacement) (install pretty much version of tool, language, env vars in a per directory level. (Or global if you want))
I tried tig first, I think Lazygit is the ideal interface to me for it. I actually don't use it apart from tags now though as I switched to jj and jjui for 2026. I think everyone has their own tool that works for them so it's hard to go wrong with a lot of these tools
CapRover for self hosted PaaS
Dozzle for self hosted logs
DuckDB was a life savior for some data analysis I needed to do
Rollbar for app error alerting - v generous free tier
This resonates. I actually ended up building a tool last year (CapSize) because I needed to churn out screenshots at a specific frame size for my day job and couldn't find anything that would just "lock" to 800x600 without a fight.
I'm not a dev by trade, so I did use AI as a power-tool to wrestle with the C++ and Electron parts. It turned into a bit of a rabbit hole—I ended up obsessed with keeping it entirely local/offline (no cloud APIs or telemetry) just to see if I could do things like local OCR in RAM. I ended up building two more tools to help me with making the one tool so it kind of spiraled into a small suite, but the main goal was just a no-frills utility that didn't require a login or a subscription just to crop an image.
Ragas for anyone building RAG pipelines.
It evaluates your retrieval quality before you've written a single line of product code. Faithfulness, answer relevance, context recall are all measurable and automatable.
Most teams I've seen find out their retrieval is broken in production. Ragas tells you in Week 0. Completely changes how you scope the build.
its low latency, can do multiple layers, and its easy to pick out a standard set of colours to draw with.
It lets me make good rhetorical diagrams, and I've also used it for drawing quick mockups to get genai to make webpages
also, Quip as a design document/review tool. Its fantastic having a design review where you get comment threads going along different parts of the requirements and design, that you can then focus on in discussion time. it also lowers the barrier to giving feedback, so newer devs can ask questions without feeling like theyre taking up valuable meeting time
code-server, instead of VSCode. I can build my own podman image on top of it with whatever dev tools I need for whatever languages I'm working with, and if I have to install something weird or something breaks I can just restart the container. Especially on my work machine that isn't Linux, I have this running in a VM and can just use in my browser and don't have to jump through hoops to get the dev environment I want. On my personal instance I also use it for automating building stuff from source. Before I had this, I just had build tools on pretty much every single machine I was building for and it was a hot mess.
Tilix + shell scripts to create a Tilix session, open windows inside Tilix and run commands, so that I can immediately create a session to debug say Linux kernel development -- 3 windows, one for gdb, one for compiling and running, and one for minicom.
I'm sure Tmux can do it, but I really hate the Ctrl+B thing. Alt + Arrow keys are way more intuitive.
You may like https://httpie.io/ if you've not memorised all the curl flags already. The CLI tools way of making requests with headers and post bodies is really nice in my opinion
https://github.com/sharkdp/bat (nice coloured cat replacement)
https://github.com/abiosoft/colima (so I don't need docker desktop)
https://github.com/duckdb/duckdb (performant database that lets you directly query JSON, parquet, csv files with SQL queries and convert one to the other.
https://github.com/eradman/entr (rerun commands automatically when provided files change) (useful for rerunning test commands automatically once you save the file you're editing.
https://github.com/martinvonz/jj and https://github.com/idursun/jjui (Jujutsu VCS, been using it for three months and I really enjoy it)
https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazydocker (managing containers, images, volumes easily)
https://github.com/jesseduffield/lazygit (best tui for git and outside niche git commands, the fastest way to use git.)
https://github.com/jdx/mise (fast asdf, direnv, and task runner replacement) (install pretty much version of tool, language, env vars in a per directory level. (Or global if you want))
https://github.com/ajeetdsouza/zoxide (intelligent cd to move between directories incredibly quickly)
https://github.com/cantino/mcfly - fuzzy shell history (feels lighter than atuin to me, in rust)
https://github.com/watchexec/watchexec - rerun on file change, knows about .gitignore/.ignore etc (in rust)
https://github.com/jonas/tig - instead of lazygit, mostly for easier git log viewing for me as I use straight git most of the time
Otherwise a lot of crossover in what I use too.
I love it so much that I pity people that use Bash, Zsh.
I'm not a dev by trade, so I did use AI as a power-tool to wrestle with the C++ and Electron parts. It turned into a bit of a rabbit hole—I ended up obsessed with keeping it entirely local/offline (no cloud APIs or telemetry) just to see if I could do things like local OCR in RAM. I ended up building two more tools to help me with making the one tool so it kind of spiraled into a small suite, but the main goal was just a no-frills utility that didn't require a login or a subscription just to crop an image.
https://dhuan.github.io/mock/latest/examples.html
It's like grep but faster and easier to use. I still use it all the time, even in the era of Claude.
https://beyondgrep.com/
I’m working on mockaton, which is mainly a filename convention based router.
https://github.com/ericfortis/mockaton
its low latency, can do multiple layers, and its easy to pick out a standard set of colours to draw with.
It lets me make good rhetorical diagrams, and I've also used it for drawing quick mockups to get genai to make webpages
also, Quip as a design document/review tool. Its fantastic having a design review where you get comment threads going along different parts of the requirements and design, that you can then focus on in discussion time. it also lowers the barrier to giving feedback, so newer devs can ask questions without feeling like theyre taking up valuable meeting time
https://github.com/coder/code-server
Why not just devcontainers? I know its a PITA to setup on podman.
[0] https://macromates.com/
:)
I'm not sure it counts as a dev tool, but I use Nushell and I'm always surprised at how few devs know about it.
Copies it to your clipboard on osx. I use this a lot.
alias pbcopy='xclip -selection clipboard'
alias pbpaste='xclip -selection clipboard -o'
I'm sure Tmux can do it, but I really hate the Ctrl+B thing. Alt + Arrow keys are way more intuitive.
They are central to my personal dev tool
https://github.com/hofstadter-io/hof
`http PUT pie.dev/put X-API-Token:123 name=John`