23 Developer Productivity Tools Every Coder Should Know

Being a good developer requires more than just strong coding skills—it’s about producing high-quality work, often under tight deadlines. One way to become a better developer is by boosting your productivity. 

While most of this improvement will come from upskilling and practice, using developer productivity tools can also make a huge difference, especially with the rapid advancements in AI.

A recent study found that developers using AI tools experienced a 26% increase in task completion—and the impact was even greater for less experienced developers.

But you don’t want to spend hours researching the best productivity tools for developers! 😅

That’s why in this article, we’re breaking down some of the most common barriers to developer productivity, and sharing the best developer productivity tools for tackling these issues, so you can take your development workflow to the next level.

One of the tools I’ll be telling you about is the sponsor of this post, Pieces.

Pieces is an on-device AI assistant that captures live context from across your entire workflow—from your browser to your IDE—, enabling it to give you super relevant and custom suggestions and automatically save your most-used code snippets for future use.

Common Barriers to Developer Productivity

So, what are the biggest issues that prevent developers from working efficiently? Let’s have a look!

💻 Working In A Suboptimal Development Environment

If your coding environment isn’t perfectly tailored to meet your needs and preferences, you’re going to keep butting up against obstacles and irritants that slow down your development process. Whether it’s unnecessary clicking or hunting around for files, every small inefficiency adds up.

⭐ Recommended Tools ⭐

One of the best ways to boost your productivity as a developer is by configuring your coding environment to be exactly how you want it. There are lots of text editors and IDEs to choose from, so it’s worth experimenting to find the one that works best for you. 

VS Code

VS Code is a great code editor for many developers because it offers a plug-and-play experience, but it’s also extremely customizable, thanks to its huge marketplace of extensions. 

Here are a few VS Code extensions that might help you work more efficiently:

• Prettier: Automatically formats code for improved readability and consistency
• Bracket Pair Colorizer: Highlights matching brackets with color, so your code is easier to read
• Pieces: Integrates an AI Copilot chat, adds a Code Lens feature similar to GitLens, and stores and organizes your favorite code snippets.

NeoVim

NeoVim is a great text editor for more experienced developers who want an efficient, keyboard-driven workflow. 

The big draw of NeoVim is how customizable it is—you can create shortcuts, set up workflows, and install plugins to make coding faster and smoother. For example, the Pieces plugin lets you store and manage your code snippets for easy use.  

☝️ Back to top

🧠 Forgetting Syntax & Solutions

While developers aren’t expected to remember everything by heart, struggling to recall the exact syntax you need can really slow you down. Likewise, if you find a solution to a problem, it’s frustrating when you need it again in the future but you can’t find it. 

You can’t get into a flow state if you keep having to dig through old projects, documentation, and tutorials, to remind yourself of the correct syntax or find bits of code you know you’ve used before.

⭐ Recommended Tools ⭐

To save you from wasting time hunting down the code you need, some tools for developers let you save code snippets for easy reference.

TextBlaze

TextBlaze is a text expansion tool that lets you create and reuse snippets of text, including code, anywhere you type. With simple keyboard shortcuts, you can quickly insert predefined bits of code.

Dash

Dash is like a personal offline documentation browser. It lets you quickly look up documentation for pretty much any programming language, framework, or tool, so you can find the exact syntax you need without switching between browser tabs and tutorials.

Pieces

Pieces lets you save and curate code snippets from your projects, directories, files, browser, and chats for future use. It also comes with collections of popular code snippets in various languages, and it can explain the code to you.

Even better, you can tag snippets by project, language, or in any other way that works for you, and Pieces automatically attaches context and metadata to your snippets, so it can surface the most relevant ones first, and you don’t have to go hunting for them.

👀 Context Switching

When you’re deep into a coding task and suddenly need to stop and familiarize yourself with a new idea, tool, or concept, you’re pulled out of the problem-solving mindset. Research suggests it takes over twenty minutes on average to get your focus back after an interruption.

⭐ Recommended Tools ⭐

All-in-one tools are a great solution for context switching.

Raycast

Raycast is a productivity tool for Macs that lets you open apps, run scripts, manage files, search the internet, and even work in GitHub, all without touching your mouse or opening a bunch of apps, so you don’t lose momentum.

Pieces

Pieces Copilot+ integrates into the tools across your entire workflow, allowing you to ask questions, generate and reuse code without leaving your coding environment, and even continue conversations as you move between tools, so you can stay in the zone. 

☝️ Back to top

⌨️ Manually Copying Code

Copying out the code you need from videos and screenshots is inefficient. Not only does it take time to pause, rewind, and carefully transcribe each line, but it also increases the chances of introducing mistakes.

⭐ Recommended Tools ⭐

Thanks to something called ‘Optical Character Recognition’ (OCR), you’ll never have to copy code from an image again.

Snagit

Snagit is a screen capture tool that uses OCR to extract text from screenshots for you. 

Pieces

Pieces goes one step further. Just drag and drop your screenshot into Pieces, and it will save both the code and the image to your repository. It will even preserve the formatting and add metadata for you.

🔍 Searching for Mistakes

Making typos and forgetting to close brackets can make your code break in unexpected ways, leading to frustrating and time-consuming bug hunts. 

⭐ Recommended Tools ⭐

Luckily, many IDEs and tools for developers can flag errors in your code.

TypeScript

TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript that uses types to check your code as you write it. It flags potential issues before they can cause problems.

SonarQube (formerly SonarLint)

SonarQube is an IDE extension that helps you catch bugs and other issues as you write. It analyzes your code and provides instant feedback on potential issues.

☝️ Back to top

🔃 Repetitive Typing and Tasks

Typing the same code snippets or performing the same tasks over and over again adds unnecessary friction to your process. Whether it’s manually typing out code you use all the time or setting up projects from scratch, you’re probably wasting time doing tasks that could be automated.

⭐ Recommended Tools ⭐

Dev productivity tools use a range of approaches to reduce and eliminate inefficiencies.  

GitHub Copilot

GitHub Copilot is an AI-powered assistant that integrates with common code editors like VS Code. It predicts what you’re going to type next, and if it’s right, you can press Tab and it will complete your code for you. This can really speed up your workflow as it eliminates a lot of typing.

Pieces

Pieces remembers everything you do, including your most frequently-used code snippets, so it always has them on hand, ready for you to insert into your project.

Placeholder Generators

While they’re not tools for programmers specifically, placeholder generators can really speed up your development process by giving you temporary content to use in your projects, so you can focus on the code instead of waiting for missing assets. 

Here are some of the most useful generators for devs:

• Lorem Ipsum: Provides placeholder text
• Lorem Picsum: Gives you placeholder images in your chosen dimensions
• RandomUser: Creates fake user data, like names, profile pictures, and addresses
• Mockaroo: Generates large datasets in formats like JSON, CSV, SQL, and Excel 

🗨️ Providing Context to Get Support

Although getting help from AI tools like ChatGPT is a huge boost to developer productivity, having to repeatedly explain what you’re working on, which tools you’re using, and what you’re trying to achieve definitely slows you down. 

⭐ Recommended Tools ⭐

Many AI-powered tools integrate with your IDE to give you tailored code suggestions without you having to manually give them any context. Each tool has a different specialty or focus.

Tabnine

Tabnine pays particular attention to the patterns in your code, so it can give you suggestions based on the syntax and stylistic choices you tend to make. This means it’s particularly useful for teams because it helps keep the code consistent across contributors.

Cursor

Cursor is best suited to projects with a more complicated architecture. It indexes your entire codebase, so it can understand the structure of your project and help with tasks like debugging and refactoring.

Pieces

Pieces Copilot+ with Live Context doesn’t just use the context from your IDE; it takes into account your entire workflow—including your browser-based research and any collaboration with teammates—, so it can give you suggestions that work with your entire project.

☝️ Back to top

🤔 Getting Back Up To Speed

When you return to a project after a little while, or even just the following day, you often need to re-familiarize yourself with the code, remind yourself where you left off, and figure out your next steps.

Instead of diving straight into your work, you have to retrace your steps, and this extra task really eats into your coding time.

⭐ Recommended Tool ⭐

Pieces

Pieces makes it easy to pick up right where you left off, because you can simply ask it to bring you up to speed! Plus, with Pieces Long Term Memory, you can backtrack through your coding journey, find important details, and access related context like snippets, tags, and collaborators. 

🧑🏽‍💻 Working With A Team

Collaborating as part of a team can introduce productivity challenges, particularly when it comes to communication and context switching.

Breaking your flow to update team members, share your work, or ask questions disrupts your focus. Searching for previous answers, instructions, or files also takes time.

⭐ Recommended Tools ⭐

Here are a few tools that reduce friction when working as part of a development team.

Pieces

Pieces makes it quick and easy to share code. With one click, you can create a link to share your code with your team, and it’ll automatically include the context, to save you from having to write out long explanations. 

Pieces also lets you save snippets from messages, and it’ll even explain them for you. If you use Teams, the ​​Pieces for Microsoft Teams plugin will enable Pieces to capture even more context about what you’re working on, so it can give you even more helpful suggestions.

GitLab

GitLab is an all-in-one DevOps platform that enables teams to manage version control, code reviews, and issue tracking from one interface, reducing the need to jump between tools.

JetBrains Space

JetBrains Space lets teams manage everything from project management and code reviews to chat and CI/CD pipelines in one place, again minimizing the need for developers to keep switching between tools.

☝️ Back to top

📱 Procrastination

Sometimes, the hardest part of coding is just getting your butt in the chair and starting. The mental hurdle of actually sitting down and starting can feel huge. 

And even then, to do their work, developers have to keep switching between tools and websites. This makes it very easy to end up off track, and accidentally waste a bunch of time not coding. 

⭐ Recommended Tools ⭐

There are lots of productivity tools out there that can help with distractions. Here are the best tools for programmers specifically.

Focusmate

Focusmate is an online platform that uses accountability to help you get your work done. It pairs you up with another person, and you work silently alongside each other for a specified amount of time. It’s much easier to be productive when someone else expects you to be!

LeechBlock

LeechBlock is a browser-based productivity tool that temporarily blocks your access to distracting websites like YouTube and Reddit.

Pieces

Pieces helps you avoid distractions by keeping everything you need in one place, whether that’s in the desktop app or your preferred IDE. By reducing the need to open a web browser, Pieces minimizes the temptation to visit distracting websites.

🔤 Needing to Switch Languages

Realizing partway through (or at the end of!) a project that it would have been better to code it using a different language can be extremely frustrating. Whether it’s due to performance issues, better libraries, or project requirements, having to rewrite large portions of code in another language is a huge time suck. 

⭐ Recommended Tools ⭐

Here are a couple of tools that will save you from having to start from scratch.

Rosetta Code

Rosetta Code is a resource that shows the same solutions in multiple programming languages. While it can’t translate your project for you, it’s a good starting point when you need to rewrite your existing code in another language.

Pieces

Pieces lets you instantly convert code snippets into different programming languages, so you don’t have to manually rewrite your code. It even adds comments to help you understand the new code.

☝️ Back to top

The Best Developer Productivity Tool for You

There’s no shortage of developer productivity tools out there. The key is finding the tools that solve your unique productivity challenges.

There’s no denying that the recent advancements in AI have been huge for developer productivity, but the true potential of AI tools is only realized when they fit seamlessly into your workflow.

That’s where Pieces comes in. By capturing the full context of your workflow and saving code snippets not just from your IDE but also from your browser, team chat, and tutorials, Pieces saves you time and reduces the need for context switching. 

Ready to boost your productivity? Try Pieces today and see how it can transform your coding process.