2025 AI Developer tools roundup

Some reflections from the first Argo Technology meetup

Tomorrow at 11am UK time I’ll be hosting a Substack Live with John Durrant of Human-Centric Engineering, to discuss everything from collaborative innovation networks to fasting - with some AI-human exploration and discussion for good measure too!

Make sure you don’t miss out:

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As we get into the tail end of the year, it’s a nice time to stop, reflect, and share some learnings.

I was delighted to host the first meeting between me and the three developers I’m working with across three clients today. Under the banner of Argo Technologies (my company), we met to showcase what everyone had worked on this year and share learnings.

It was fun because I know all of them individually, and I always get a kick out of creating new connections by bringing cool people together.

But it was also really valuable. As I’ve discussed recently, I think the most important skill / trait / characteristic we can cultivate in this moment in time is our ability to learn.

Why we’re all juniors now

And without doubt, the core common factor among the engineers I’m working with is their adaptability and high learning quotient.

Despite working on completely different applications across a diverse set of industries, there were surprising technical overlaps. Generating PDFs for users, creating internally facing dashboards, and the value of feature flags all cropped up across the range of projects, from personality quizzes to rheumatoid arthritis support apps.

Most exciting and interesting for me was the discussion around AI tools, which ones people were using, where they found them valuable and where they still could cause more problems than they solved.

Key takeaways I took from the conversation with the developers in terms of useful tooling (both AI and otherwise) for early-stage startups:

• CodeRabbit: “Like having a senior review all my work and catch issues I wouldn’t have thought about”. I also like the PR specific poems it generates :)

• Taskmaster: I’d describe it as a mini-AI technical PM - taking product requirements and breaking them down into small discrete, sequentialised technical task (including dependencies) and then integrating with your agent of choice to work through each step one at a time. Positive reviews so far.

• Retool: Still great for rapidly spinning up internal dashboards. I suspect it’s value will decrease as agentic tools get better and it becomes easier and easier to ‘one-shot’ a dashboard, but for the project we chose it for, it’s been great as a starter.

• PostHog: great combination of analytics, session replays, and feature flags as well as generous start-up program makes it a fantastic choice for early-stage products. Plus, they have an awesome website.

• Claude still was generally considered to be the best coding model, but Gemini 3 is a close second, and in cases where it’s already bundled with a companies business subscription it is usually more than good enough. Google are in an incredibly strong position with their distribution!

It's a real privilege to work with these engineers, junior or otherwise, as we navigate this shifting landscape and find new ways to deliver value to the clients we’re working with. I hope this is the beginning of a learning network that will only grow and develop over time.

For now though, over to you - are there any other tools missing from this list?

And stay tuned for tomorrow, where I share my Fractional CTO toolkit for 2025.