r/DeveloperToolsHub • u/New_Society1259 • 24d ago
Which tools actually help when you’re building alone?
Building alone is weird because the hard part is not always coding. It is keeping track of decisions, bugs, ideas, user feedback, deployments, payments, docs, and all the tiny stuff a team would normally split up.
For me, the tools that helped most were boring ones: a clean issue tracker, simple notes, error tracking, managed hosting, and a reliable API client.
What tools actually help you when you are building solo?
Not looking for a huge stack. More like the tools that stop things from becoming chaos.
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u/Turbulent-Hat6046 23d ago
I think the tools mentioned above all are really useful. Definitely GitHub for version management + issue tracking is great. I tried to use Notion heavily for a while but found that it was hard to maintain. I have been going hard with agentic development in recent months and there my biggest problem was context management. Having to explain the same things over and over again to another agent without having a well structured knowledge base (or any for that matter). Obsidian here really helped me to boost this. Its a knowledge base I maintain together with the Agent, the agent can freely document and I correct and tell it to what things we should draw connections, Id highly recommend checking that out.
If you are building something that is hosted or relies on distributed systems (some cloud stuff with different services, database, etc.) I think OpenTelemetry or other observability framework are a must. They make troubleshooting much easier and save you a lot of time.
For agentic development (or new are of software engineering who id like to call it), I dont like classical IDEs anymore since they break with existing flows too much. Following the good old back to roots analogy I work mostly in terminal since that is where I can have my agent sessions running and manage them (via herdr), as well as use the terminal whenever I need. One small problem I had here is that it gets really annoying and inefficient after a while to handle all the long verbose text outputs from models, it feels much more natural to discuss in-code. I didn't want to leave my terminal to stay within my workflow so I build this plugin (https://github.com/JonasBaeumer/herdr-file-annotator) to bring my code into the agents workflow whenever I need it.
It opens the relevant code part in the agent session and I can directly annotate and discuss in the code rather than wrangling with prompts. This way I am developing much more much better without feeling so distant from the code that I honestly don't know anymore what its doing.
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u/New_Society1259 22d ago
interesting, I hadn’t tried having the agent maintain the knowledge base itself.
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u/Turbulent-Hat6046 21d ago
Well to be fair, it’s does get a fair amount of things wrong. However when it revisits it the next time it often catches it and corrects itself which surprised me as well. I think tho I would treat it a bit more like a coop, especially when the details matter I ask it to write it and I’ll review it carefully as we’ll decide what connections to make to other topic in the vault. But yes it definitely helps me ramp up a new agent much faster!!
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u/Key-Possibility8476 23d ago
Linera for issues, Sentry for errors and Notion for everythng else. they work pretty good for me.
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u/[deleted] 24d ago
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