N.03 / TOOLS
Tools for a self-directed life
A path from attention and reasoning to state and delivery. Not a tool collection, and not a performance of building everything.
The tools I use do not add up to an identity. They are a way to connect attention, judgment and delivery. The closer something sits to a critical path, the more I want to understand, change and verify it. The farther away it sits, the more willing I am to use a mature product.
01 / Computing space
Arch Linux, Niri and DMS (Dank Material Shell) form the everyday computing space. Arch keeps the system’s composition legible; Niri organizes windows as a scrollable tiling workspace; DMS brings desktop state and daily actions into one coherent interface. Order the computing space before approaching the problem.
This choice has a maintenance cost. It suits me, but not because it is “purer”, and not because everyone should work this way.
02 / Editing and reasoning
Zed holds project context; Vim and Neovim preserve precision in high-frequency text work. DeepSeek challenges approaches, finds counterexamples and breaks down difficult problems, but it does not make the final judgment instead of code and experiments.
AI is a second opinion here, not an arbiter. It can speed up exploration, and it can produce plausible things that do not hold. The final evidence still comes from code, tests and measurement.
03 / Version and state
Git preserves changes, branches and traceable decisions. DeltaDB holds structured state that must remain available for storage and queries. Code has a history; data has an explicit place.
Where state lives is an architectural question, not a tool preference. That location determines who can read it, who can change it, and whether a failure can return to the last explicable version.
04 / Infrastructure I own
Sodama carries the network runtime and Linux/eBPF datapath. Somadoc turns Markdown through IR and Typst into PDF or per-page SVG. One handles real traffic; the other handles knowledge output.
I do not just use tools; I turn critical paths into infrastructure I own. But owning does not mean building everything. Autonomy is knowing what is worth maintaining, what is not, and when a mature product is the more honest choice.
The boundary
Tool complexity does not prove a person’s value. Treating a desktop configuration, editor plugins or self-hosted services as an identity performance is not fundamentally different from defining yourself with a job title. What follows records choices and their costs, not a list to imitate.