← Simon Pacheco

Uses

What I actually use day to day.

Inspired by uses.tech. The real list, not the aspirational one.

Hardware

  • MacBook Pro— Apple Silicon. The fan almost never spins. I’ve been on Macs my whole career and I’m not going anywhere.
  • External display for the home setup; laptop screen on the road.
  • iPhonefor everything that isn’t writing code.
  • iPad for reading and the occasional Pencil sketch.

Editor & terminal

  • Claude Code in the terminal. The biggest single shift in how I work in the last few years. Most of my coding now happens in conversation with Claude rather than in a traditional editor session.
  • VS Code when I need a real editor — TypeScript, React, quick file edits, anything where the LSP is doing the heavy lifting.
  • Xcodefor iOS / Swift work. The trade-off is what it is; the iOS toolchain doesn’t leave anywhere else to go.
  • iTerm2 with a clean tmux setup. Nothing fancy.

Languages

  • TypeScript — most of what I ship for the web.
  • Swift — iOS development.
  • Python — scripts, data, anything that needs a fast prototype.
  • SQL — Postgres dialect, by far. I prefer raw queries to ORM magic when the schema gets non-trivial.

Web stack

  • Next.jswith the App Router. React 19. Tailwind CSS for styling. shadcn/ui for components when I don’t want to write them from scratch.
  • Prisma for the data layer; PostgreSQL underneath.
  • Docker for everything that needs to run in production.
  • Vercel when something needs to be on the public internet with zero ops; my own VPS when I need control.

iOS

  • SwiftUI first, UIKit when I have to. Swift Concurrency throughout — async/await, actors, the whole thing.
  • The Composable Architectureon the projects where it earns its complexity; vanilla MVVM where it doesn’t.
  • TestFlight for everything before the App Store.

AI

  • Claude— Anthropic’s models for almost all the real work. Sonnet for speed, Opus when the task earns it.
  • OpenAI APIs for specific tasks where their models still edge out — vision in some cases, embeddings in others.
  • ElevenLabs when text needs to become voice.

The rest

  • 1Password for secrets.
  • Linearfor anything that needs a real ticket; Apple Notes for everything that doesn’t.
  • Telegram for the stuff I want on my phone but out of my email.
  • Spotify while I work; quiet otherwise.

Last updated: 2026. I refresh this when something material changes, not on a schedule.