Site of Steven Irby

It’s that time of year again. Where I look back at my favorite software I used through the year and give a shoutout. 2025 has been an interesting year for software with the rise of LLMs. I notice a trend of software just being generally BAD now across the board with LLMs and vibe coding being such a thing. (I’m guilty of it too).

Here’s a look at the what I think was good software to use.

Beeper

Beeper - I love that I only need one app for all my messaging. While I think it was better before Automattic acquired them, they keep making it slowly better and finally added Google Voice support. So I truly only need one app to chat! One inbox to rule them all.

Cursor

Cursor is an AI-powered IDE, and while I find it buggy as hell, it’s oh so powerful for what I call “vibe architecting.” I’ve shipped more this last year than I’ve ever shipped before. All in this IDE. It’s genuinely transformed how I write code and build projects. Though I’m using Claude Code more and more now.

Kagi

Kagi is now my daily driver for search. I use the summary tool ALL the time. It’s been great and way better than Google. No ads, no tracking, just actual search results. The way search should be. Worth it.

Ghostty

The hype is real! Ghostty is so fast and gets out of your way. I’ve replaced iTerm 2 with it completely. I’m a big fan of the creator, Mitchell Hashimoto, who is a genuine software hero (the founder of HashiCorp, creator of Vagrant, Terraform, and more). When he builds something, you know it’s going to be good.

Nucleo

Nucleo is an icon library and manager that I use in all my projects. I use their icons constantly, AND I use their app for managing SVGs from all open source projects. I use it pretty much weekly nowadays. It’s become an indispensable part of my design workflow.

Waymo

Yes, robot taxis are coming. Waymo is wayyyy better than Uber, and you feel like you’re living in the literal future. I got to ride in several of them in California this year. It’s coming to London maybe next year, and I’m all for it! The technology is mind blowingly impressive.

Cloudflare

Cloudflare - Yes, they’re becoming a monopoly. Yes, they’re taking over the web. But wow, do they offer such a nice alternative to AWS and so many services for free or extremely dirt cheap! It’s just hard to beat and one of the best tools for building software in existence today. Workers, Pages, R2, D1, Queues… the list goes on. I know, I know… I’m part of the problem.

Coolify

Coolify is a self-hostable, open-source alternative to platforms like Heroku, Netlify, and Vercel. It’s a pain to self-host, but I’m doing it more and more as it’s just so much cheaper. If I’m not using Cloudflare, I’m self-hosting with Coolify. The savings add up quickly, and having full control over your infrastructure is worth the extra setup effort.

That’s my list for 2025! It’s been an incredible year for tooling, especially with AI-powered development tools and the continued maturation of developer infrastructure. What software did you discover this year?