How I Build — Adam Montgomery
This is a guide to my tools and processes for building software. I'm writing this both to share what I've found with other humans, and as guidance for LLMs that interact with me & share my tools.
I've found these tools helpful building "pre-LLM" software in small and large startups, and for LLM-enabled applications like I'm working on now. My tool choices are largely informed by how I structure software. I don't spend much time justifying my tools here. That's both for brevity, and because I think tools either resonate with a person or they don't . It's also not exhaustive—these are what I keep in the tool chest, not the attic.1
I use a MacBook Air 15". I used to always go with a beefed up MacBook Pro, but switched and haven't missed it. If I do anything compute intensive, I usually just use another computer.
I use Karabiner-Elements to map caps_lock -> left-ctrl, left-ctrl -> esc, and right-cmd + hjkl -> arrow keys. This makes ctrl+{x} more ergonomic, esc more accessible, and gives me an alternative to the arrow keys. The first two can be done with system preferences alone.
