Tech Radar
Tool and technology decisions, organized by ring.
| Ring | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Adopt | In active use; recommended |
| Trial | Being evaluated; promising enough to run in real workflows |
| Assess | Worth watching; not yet trialed |
| Hold | Not adopted; rationale documented |
Neovim
Section titled “Neovim”Neovim: my editor for code navigation, editing, diagnostics, and pull request review. FzfLua provides fuzzy finding inside the editor.
Version control for the dotfiles and development work, with shared aliases, diffs, branch workflows, and worktree support.
My interactive shell, with shared aliases, completion, autosuggestions, and fuzzy navigation.
Starship
Section titled “Starship”Shared shell prompt showing directory, repository, runtime, and command context.
Searchable shell history integrated with the interactive shell.
Syntax-highlighted file viewing, manual pages, help output, and picker previews.
Fast file and directory discovery feeding fuzzy pickers and editor navigation.
Directory listings with icons, Git information, long views, and tree views.
ripgrep
Section titled “ripgrep”Fast text search across repositories, used directly and through editor and shell workflows.
direnv
Section titled “direnv”Directory-scoped environment loading for project-specific development contexts.
Readable Git diffs with syntax highlighting and structured changes in terminal review and previews.
GitHub CLI
Section titled “GitHub CLI”GitHub pull request, issue, check, and repository operations from the terminal.
JSON filtering, transformation, and inspection in command-line workflows.
YAML querying and transformation in command-line workflows.
Named project commands and repeatable task recipes.
Retained terminal multiplexer for existing sessions and agent-status integrations alongside Zellij.
Claude Code
Section titled “Claude Code”Coding agent used with shared skills, role instructions, and repository guidance. The repository-owned skill-authoring workflow maintains cross-host instructions without an external authoring plugin.
Coding agent used with shared skills, role instructions, and repository guidance. GitHub PR publication goes through Octo’s recorded writer and publication checks. Shared specification, writing, learning-capture, and handoff workflows use portable skill packages and the repository-owned skill-authoring workflow.
I use fzf for shell navigation and Neovim through FzfLua. The directory and worktree picker uses its query matcher inside a Charmed terminal UI.
Terminal emulator. Implements tabs entirely within a single OS window — yabai sees exactly one window per Kitty instance, so tiling and focus work correctly.
Tiling window manager via the macOS Accessibility API. Manages all windows at the OS level.
Zellij
Section titled “Zellij”Zellij: my adopted terminal multiplexer with tmux-style bindings and a compact layout in Kitty. Bootstrap installs version 0.45.1 or newer; zj main attaches to or creates a named session. Tmux remains available for existing agent-status integrations.
Required correctness lint in the reusable TypeScript profile, alongside typed ESLint and Prettier. Biome findings cannot be added to retrofit baselines.
worktree manager
Section titled “worktree manager”worktree creates identifiable repository-local agent checkouts, tracks full ownership and protects active tasks. Finishing protection and explicit safe pruning replace reusable Treehouse allocation for new agent work.
Mergiraf
Section titled “Mergiraf”Mergiraf: selected by the shell set, with a machine-level tools.mergiraf = false opt-out. Installation activates syntax-aware Git merging for its supported file types. Runnable TOML, Lua, and JSON examples demonstrate combined independent edits and retained disagreements. Revisit the trial after reviewing resolutions during normal branch integration; Zsh remains outside the installed binary’s advertised language coverage.
Keylease
Section titled “Keylease”Keylease SSH approval: one-time Mac approval for remote commands and Go applications, configured through OpenSSH while preserving the authentication agent. Evaluate the cooperative approval interaction in normal remote workflows before broader adoption.
Paseo: a workspace and conversation interface I’m trialing with Pi. Codex and Claude use their native agent tools; their Paseo providers, hooks, tools, and orchestration skills are disabled. This trial is separate from the retired Firstmate workflow.
Viewrule
Section titled “Viewrule”Viewrule: my tool for rendered UI checks, screenshot references, and a feedback-to-rule workflow. Trial task-specific density rules against actual rejected and accepted screens before promoting them globally.
Assess
Section titled “Assess”Pi: a composable agent runtime under assessment. It can reuse the existing shared skills, Builder guidance, and role instructions. Assess supervision, review results, and status reporting before starting a trial.
AeroSpace
Section titled “AeroSpace”AeroSpace is a tiling WM that operates at the app level rather than hooking into the macOS window server. It may handle Ghostty’s native NSWindowTabGroup tab grouping without the window-jumping issue that currently blocks a Ghostty migration (see Hold: Ghostty).
Firstmate through Paseo and GitHub
Section titled “Firstmate through Paseo and GitHub”Firstmate mobile workflow: former mobile coordination workflow through Paseo, Pi, and GitHub. Retired from my workflow; no longer being evaluated.
Superpowers
Section titled “Superpowers”Claude Code workflow plugin. Removed from the shared settings at the owner’s request in favor of the remaining official plugins and custom skills. Skill maintenance now uses the repository-owned skill-authoring workflow, without an external authoring-plugin prerequisite.
OpenCode
Section titled “OpenCode”AI coding assistant with a TUI interface. Put on hold due to memory leaks during long sessions and persistent lag in supporting new model releases — discovered while working around a Vertex AI 1M context window bug that required a upstream PR to fix.
Revisit if memory stability improves and model support keeps pace with provider releases.
Ghostty
Section titled “Ghostty”Ghostty implements tabs as native macOS NSWindowTabGroup windows — tabbingMode is set to .preferred/.automatic in the source regardless of macos-titlebar-style. Yabai sees each tab as a separate managed window, causing the active window to jump and resize on every tab switch. There is no config option to set tabbingMode = .disallowed.
A workaround was attempted using Yabai signals to force BSP layout on each Ghostty window event, but it did not resolve the jumping behaviour:
yabai -m signal --add app='^Ghostty$' event=window_created action='yabai -m space --layout bsp'yabai -m signal --add app='^Ghostty$' event=window_destroyed action='yabai -m space --layout bsp'Revisit if AeroSpace (see Assess) proves able to handle native tab groups transparently.
andrej-karpathy-skills
Section titled “andrej-karpathy-skills”A Claude Code plugin packaging four behavioral principles (think before coding, simplicity, surgical edits, goal-driven execution) attributed to Karpathy’s coding agent guidelines. Evaluated and skipped — the global CLAUDE.md already covers all four principles, often more precisely and with harder edges. No executable tooling, MCP servers, or commands; purely policy text.
sccache
Section titled “sccache”Rust compiler cache. Grows unboundedly on disk — even with max_cache_size set, the cache frequently bloats to tens of gigabytes across multiple projects and toolchain versions. The disk pressure outweighs the incremental build-time savings for typical dotfiles/personal project usage.
Revisit if Mozilla ships more aggressive eviction or if a per-project cache isolation story emerges.