My tech stack for 2026

Posted on Thu 01 January 2026 in posts

Introduction

I have settled on many tools over the past couple of years that I use daily and that help me stay productive during my work. I thought that sharing some of the things I use daily would help others in deciding what to use in their craft.

IDE

I use neovim by the way (finally able to use this line!).

But all jokes aside, it has been my main IDE since 2023 or so and I find it invaluable. Previously I heavily used VS Code which was cool but felt heavy. I learned my Vim navigation in VS Code, so no complaints, it was a great learning experience during grad school.

Word of advice: neovim is great. And, despite people saying it has a steep learning curve, it's not too bad. The secret really is to just do it. That's it. Just use it for all your editing needs. That's how I made the switch, by just making neovim my main editor wherever possible.

A feature I missed A LOT from VS Code was multiple cursors. But you can get around that with things like search and replace, and visual block mode (look it up!).

And it makes you think differently about editing. As you change your thinking, you get better at Vim and voila, you use neovim btw.

LazyVim Plugin Manager

This is the easiest configuration plugin I found. It comes with a ton of things out of the box for pretty much every language you can think of. It includes many extras. I especially recommend LazyExtras collection of available addons.

I recommend using snacks for all your utilities. This is a collection built by the author of LazyVim and it an excellent addition to the setup with great keymaps, extensions and such.

Python Tooling

uv

My main Python tool remains uv. It makes package management and virtual environment easy, and integrates tremendously well with other tools I will talk about below.

ruff

From the creators of uv, ruff is a linter and formatter for your python code. I have been using it all of 2025. And it's been great.

ty

I have relied on basedpyright for all my type-checking in the editor. Recently, ty has emerged as a fast type-checker which I was looking forward to try. This will be new and as of writing this, the checker is in beta.

ML Tooling

optuna

We all work with hyperparameters. optuna is the answer to finding the ones which suit the solution best.

It can iterate over trials and sample values from ranges and sets. It allows to prune trials reducing the search space significantly.

mlflow

Really good tool for experiment tracking. From tracking traditional tabular data ML to modern LLM applications (DSPy prompt tuning, for instance), you get everything you need to organize your work.

This will level up the observability game in any ML development.

LLMs

Claude Code, Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini - these are all models that help bounce ideas around and prototype implementations of different projects. It helps having multiple models around, and of course the resulting recommendations require scrutiny and checks all around, but these are tremendous for bouncing around ideas and getting quick code snippets for things that feel repetitive or mundane (my recent example is reading a long file in C++ and trying to do that with functional programming which failed).

Command Line Utilities

Terminal Emulator

I have tried various solutions, and, as of late 2025, kitty became my terminal of choice. It's great when working with tabs, pre-configured sessions, it's great performance-wise and makes overall dev experience better in my opinion.

I tried various multiplexers from tmux to screen to zellij. I have used zellij the longest and back in my PhD study years, screen was most useful over SSH connection when running long processes.

Lately, using basic tabs from kitty is more than enough for my needs.

Various CLIs

In no particular order, here are some tools I like to use daily:

  • eza: a colorful alternative to ls
  • bat: similar alternative to cat for viewing file content
  • Raycast: This is a nice-to-have search replacement for Spotlight. It can keep track of your calendar and help you quickly connect to zoom meetings. While I don't use their AI capability, it's nice to know that there is one.
  • dua: a great command line tool for disk size checks
  • tldr: awesome documentation summarizer with examples of quick usage for various CLIs and tools.
  • lazygit: incredible git command line tool, really helps dealing with various git workflows
  • lazydocker: similar in design and philosophy, helps working with docker in simplified manner.

dotfiles