My Development Setup
The mindset
I'm interested in agents because I'm interested in reinforcemente learning, moreover, I'm interested in how tools such as Sheaf Cohomology can be used to improve global strategy. As in Math, I think you learn many of the things happening in AI by osmosis. To do so, you have to begin somewhere and I find Hugging Face daily papers to be an intriguing space: you can get an idea of where industry is heading to by just reading the abstracts. I'm sure that if you have enough mathematical maturity it will all eventually start to make sense.
What I do is that I pick something that looks interesting and read through it, I ended up implementing active memory reconstruction by just doing that.
On the other hand, this is a global and social phenomena, so it is a good idea to keep up with the news, Bloomberg and FT offer good coverage and most of the time there is not a lot of hype there. Who has a new model? Who is getting acquired? Who has more compute now? Those are important questions you need to consider if you care about the impact of this technology in our civilization. You will get all of this information the day it happens, instead of in the weekend, when you favorite newsletter arrives.
If you are a student both media outlets offer significant discounts, I think in both cases it is an extremely good investment. Check if your institution offers free FT subscriptions, if that is the case I really envy you, it is expensive.
My environment
I'm on a Macbook Pro with an M4 Pro chip and 48GB of RAM, so most of the things I will list here will work if you are on any reasonable linux distro. If you are on windows, well, you really need to take some time for introspection.
Terminal
I use cmux, I don't really like it but it is good enough, I mainly enjoy the notification system and the browser tabs within the terminal. If I could do both things with zellij, then I would stick to it and just use ghostty.
For the shell I use zsh together with oh my zsh, it just works, I dont have to think about it at all and I appreciate that.
Editor
I use neovim, by the way. I'm lazy, I use lazyvim, the lazy package manager is widely supported so you are under no risk if you pick this config.
I doubt there is anything special in my config, I try to keep it minimal. I don't write a lot of code these days so most of the time I use neovim only to navigate my codebase. I can renounce to writing code, but I will never, I swear, never, give up my vim key-bindings. Once you get used to them you will need them everywhere.
I use the vimium extension for that matter, it allows you to navigate without leaving the keyboard, most of the time it works but sometimes you have to turn it off.
the vi-mode plugin in zshrc allows you to do the same, I find it very useful when editing commands in the terminal