Your First Year as a Junior Dev: 7 Tools You Actually Need (Skip the Rest)

The tool-hopping trap

The most common time-waster I see in juniors is what I call tool-hopping: spending more time configuring editors, switching terminal emulators, tweaking dotfiles, and reading “X vs Y” comparison posts than actually writing code. The Twitter dev-influencer aesthetic encourages this — beautiful setups generate engagement.

The reality of the first year as a dev: 90% of your output comes from 4 hours per day of focused work, in whatever environment lets you ship the work fastest. The right tool stack is the invisible one — fade into the background, never blocks you, never trips you up.

This is the 7-tool list I’d give my past self. Everything else is optional.

1. VS Code (default editor)

Use VS Code. It’s free, the extension ecosystem is the deepest, and 80%+ of professional engineers use it. The marginal productivity differences between VS Code, Neovim, JetBrains IDEs, etc., for a junior dev are statistically zero — they’re dwarfed by your underlying skill level.

The one exception: if you’re going into mobile/iOS, learn Xcode. If you’re going into Android, learn Android Studio. Otherwise: VS Code.

What you should skip: setting up Neovim, switching to Cursor on day one, debating Vim vs Emacs in your team Slack. These look like investment in productivity but the ROI is negative for the first 12-18 months. Pick VS Code, install the language-specific extension pack for whatever you write, and move on.

2. Cursor or Claude Code (AI pair programmer)

Once you’ve been writing for 3-6 months and have a baseline understanding of what good code looks like — switch from raw VS Code to Cursor, or use Claude Code in your terminal. Pick one. Both cost ~$20/month and both will radically change how you work.

The 3-6 month delay is important. AI pair programmers are not “type a prompt, get working code” — they’re “describe what you want, get a 70% draft, you review and fix the 30% the AI got wrong.” If you can’t recognize when the AI is wrong, you’ll ship subtly broken code. The first 3-6 months are when you build that recognition.

Once you have it: AI pair programming is the single biggest productivity multiplier of your career. Use it.

What you should skip: dropping the AI tool because “I want to learn the fundamentals myself.” Wrong frame. The fundamentals are recognizing what good code looks like. AI tools accelerate you toward that recognition by exposing you to many more code samples per week than you’d write by hand.

3. Git (just git, no fancy GUIs)

Learn git in the terminal. Not GitHub Desktop, not GitKraken, not the VS Code source control panel exclusively. The terminal commands. There are roughly 12 git commands you need: clone, pull, push, branch, checkout, add, commit, log, diff, merge, rebase, stash. Memorize them.

Every senior engineer you’ll work with uses terminal git. Every CI/CD log shows terminal git output. Every “your branch is in a weird state” recovery scenario requires terminal git commands. The GUIs are a shortcut that breaks down in exactly the moments you need it most.

For learning: do “Learn Git Branching” (free interactive tutorial). For ongoing reference: keep the man pages bookmarked.

What you should skip: anything that promises “git without the complexity.” The complexity is the point — git’s data model is opinionated and you need to understand it to work with it.

4. Postman or HTTPie (API exploration)

If you’re doing any web dev, you’ll be making HTTP requests against APIs constantly. Pick one tool for poking at APIs — Postman if you want a GUI and can tolerate its bloat, HTTPie if you live in the terminal. Skip Insomnia (smaller community), skip curl exclusively (the syntax is masochistic for anything beyond a basic GET).

The skill this builds is being able to test an API before you write the code that calls it. Many junior bugs come from “I assumed the API returns X format” when it actually returns Y. Postman/HTTPie lets you check first.

5. A terminal you actually like (iTerm2 on Mac, Windows Terminal on Windows)

Spend one afternoon setting up your terminal. Install iTerm2 (Mac) or use Windows Terminal (already on Windows 11). Pick a theme that doesn’t strain your eyes. Install zsh + Oh My Zsh if you’re on Mac/Linux, or PowerShell with the official prompt customizations on Windows.

Don’t go further. Don’t build a custom Powerline config, don’t install 40 plugins, don’t migrate to fish or nushell. Your goal is “terminal works, looks decent, isn’t actively annoying.” 90% of dev terminal time is in the IDE’s integrated terminal anyway.

6. Notion or Obsidian (for your dev notebook)

Keep a written log of what you’re learning. Every senior engineer I respect has some version of this — a personal knowledge base where they capture commands they had to look up twice, gotchas they hit, paragraph summaries of articles they read.

Tool choice doesn’t matter much. Notion works if you want collaboration and cloud sync (free for personal use). Obsidian works if you want local markdown files and don’t trust cloud (free for personal use, $10/month for sync).

The key is consistency. A note created every 2-3 days of work becomes invaluable when you hit the same problem again in 6 months. Without it, you’ll re-Google the same answers indefinitely.

7. A scheduling tool that actually works (Cron, Reclaim, or Sunsama)

This is the unexpected one. Your single biggest productivity multiplier in year one isn’t a coding tool — it’s the discipline to focus on one thing for 90 minutes at a time. The dev work that compounds in year one is uninterrupted depth, not breadth.

Pick a tool that helps you block time. Reclaim ($10/month) auto-schedules deep work blocks around your meetings. Sunsama ($16/month) is a daily planning ritual that forces intentionality. Even just a recurring Google Calendar block labeled “Code: do not disturb” works.

Tool-hop on this if you need to, but commit to some system for protecting 2-3 deep work blocks per day. The juniors who get promoted faster aren’t the ones with the prettiest code editor — they’re the ones who can ship a feature in 4 days instead of 4 weeks because they actually focus.

What’s not on the list (and why)

• Docker (you’ll learn it on the job; trying to learn it from scratch in your first 6 months is mostly distraction)
• A specific framework (React vs Vue vs Svelte; pick the one your job uses, don’t learn ahead)
• A note-taking research tool like Logseq, RemNote, Roam (overhead exceeds value for most juniors)
• A “modern” terminal multiplexer like tmux or zellij (handy later, distraction now)
• Dotfile management with Chezmoi or yadm (only when you actually have a stable dotfile setup worth managing)
• A second monitor of a specific model, a mechanical keyboard, a standing desk (ergonomics matter, but tool obsession with hardware substitutes for skill-building)

The minimum viable setup

If you wanted to start your first dev job tomorrow with the smallest possible tool footprint:

• VS Code with the language pack for your stack
• iTerm2 or Windows Terminal with default config
• Git in the terminal
• Postman free tier
• Notion free tier for notes
• $20/month Cursor subscription starting at month 4

Total recurring cost: $20/month. Total setup time: ~3 hours.

This is enough. Add complexity only when you hit a friction point that demands it. The “I should optimize my setup” instinct in year one is almost always misdirected energy.

Verdict

The trap is real and almost every junior falls into it for a while. Notice when you’re tool-shopping instead of coding. Default to the boring, mainstream tool. Save the fancy setups for year three, when you’ll know which optimizations actually matter for your workflow.

In your first year: ship features, write code, read code, fix bugs. The right tools are the ones that disappear into the background while you do that.