Newsletter v0.3: Can a tool's DX really improve my productivity?

I find that with vibe coding there are more AI and non-AI tools out there, making it harder to figure out which ones are the best to help with efficiency and productivity. The way I tend to find out about new tools is through social media. I might see a post on X, LinkedIn or Substack Notes which piques my interest. Sometimes though there is so much hype around the same tools that it can get a bit noisy. I’ve written this post to share the projects and tools I have been watching and using recently.

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1. Orca ADE. This is my new favourite open source IDE, well ADE. It can run Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode and more, side by side in isolated worktrees.
   Ghostty-inspired terminals, a built-in file editor, and git tracking keep every branch moving. The project and community are super active on Twitter, GitHub and Discord - it is refreshing to be communicating and building with the core team.

2. Playwright e2e testing. Everyone is building, but why is no one testing? I love vibe coding my ideas so they come to life, but I also love knowing that there are end-to-end tests covering the features I have created. This gives me the peace of mind that in future they will continue to work even as I iterate on the project.

3. Supabase is my go to open source backend for any project. It has everything I ever need: a Postgres database, authentication, APIs, Edge Functions, Realtime Data, Storage, and Vector embeddings. It doesn’t have emails, but for that there is Resend - recently I tried this platform and thought it was amazing. The DX was great, it did exactly what was needed and nothing more! As they say “less is more”.

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1. Matt Pocock (yes, the TypeScript one) opened up his own .agents directory.

   That is the part I want you to notice. Not a tutorial about how to write agent skills. The actual skills he uses on his own work, every day. In a few weeks it has already reached almost 200k stars on GitHub.

2. OmiRoute is An MIT-licensed AI gateway. One endpoint, 290+ providers (90+ of them free), 500+ models, quota-aware auto-fallback, and token compression the project claims saves 15-95%.

   Two reasons I like it as a builder:

   • You stop rewriting your integration every time you switch model.

   • You stop being dead in the water when one provider rate limits you or the provider goes down like Claude did yesterday.

Claude Code got parallel sub agents. Subagents can now spawn their own subagents up to depth 3, capped at 20 concurrent. If you are nervous about burning too many tokens there is: --max-budget-usd flag which now actually halts background agents when you hit the cap.

Small thing worth knowing: /code-review now runs in the background, so it stops flooding your conversation.

1. What are you building at the moment?

2. What tools/projects are you using daily?