The Tools I'd Keep If I Could Only Have Five

Imagine someone tells you to clear out your toolbox. You can keep five tools. Everything else goes.

I like this question because it forces honesty. Most of us have dozens of apps, plugins and subscriptions, and only a handful do real work.

I work as both a designer and a developer, so my list has to cover the whole path from a blank page to a live website. Here are the five I would keep. This is my own setup, based on my budget and the way I work, so it won't be right for everyone.

1. Claude Design

I'll be honest, I was hesitant about this one at first.

But if you need something done in a very organized manner, I do it in Claude Design. Figma is great, and I have nothing against it. I just don't have a lot of budget to pay for it, so I do everything in Claude now.

I'm still in control of the design. I decide how it looks and feels, what works and what doesn't, and how things are structured based on what the business needs. Claude gives some input that is really great, to be honest. But it's not 100% there yet, so I treat its ideas as suggestions, not answers.

2. Next.js

This one is my bias, and I want to be upfront about that.

I pick Next.js because of how the dev world works right now, and because it works so well with the rest of my setup. I explain my reasoning in more detail in Webflow vs Next.js vs WordPress: How I Choose.

3. Claude Code

Claude Code works best for me with Next.js. Maybe it was trained a lot on code around Next.js. I can't say for sure, but that's how it feels.

It isn't only good at that. I tried building a karaoke app with Spotify, written in Python and native to Mac, and it worked well too. That's about as far as I've gone outside Next.js, though. It's a personal project, and I can't deploy it. If you're interested in that project, let me know.

4. A code editor

AI writes a lot of the code, but I still read it.

I try to read as much as I can. Not everything, just a little, enough to check how it works and to make sure everything is secure. That habit matters more than which editor I use. If I stop looking at what's being written, I stop knowing what I'm shipping.

5. Vercel

Next.js, Vercel and Claude are like brothers. They work so well together.

Vercel is also cheap, at least for my use case. The best part is that I don't have to think about the infrastructure. I push my code, it goes live, and I keep building.

What didn't make the cut

Plenty of good tools missed the list: project management apps, analytics dashboards, inspiration sites, and a dozen browser extensions.

I use some of them and I'm glad they exist. But if I lost them tomorrow, I could still design, build and launch a website. That is the test I use before adding anything new: would I notice if it disappeared?

What I took from this exercise

Most of my five tools involve AI, and I'm still careful about it. I wrote in Why All Websites Look the Same Now that AI can produce something polished in minutes, and that's exactly the problem when nobody is steering.

So my rule is simple: let the tools make the work faster, and keep the decisions.

If you had to keep only five, what would be on your list?