GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Claude Code, Codeium, Tabnine. I integrated each into my daily workflow for a week each. Here is my honest take on what actually helps you ship.
Most teams pick a JavaScript package manager based on what was popular when the project started. Five years later they're paying for that decision in install time and disk usage. Here is the honest comparison: pnpm's strict mode, yarn 4's feature parity, npm's recent improvements, and Bun's speed.
Cypress invented the modern E2E testing experience. Playwright surpassed it on capability, speed, and parallelism. Here is the side-by-side that matters: real-world test runtime, which APIs are stable, the cross-browser story, and the migration cost if you're already on Cypress.
Vite's dev experience is dramatically better than Webpack's: sub-second hot reloads versus 30 seconds. The migration is real work though, and not always worth it. Here is the realistic comparison, the migration patterns that succeed, and the cases where Webpack is still the right tool.
A default ESLint config has 80 rules and most of them are noise. The ones worth their CI cost catch real bugs: async without await, exhaustive switches, no-floating-promises. Here are the twelve I turn on for every TypeScript project, and the four I turn off because they cause more harm than good.
SemVer is simple on paper and dishonest in practice. Most maintainers ship breaking changes in patches and call it "a bug fix." Here is what each version part actually means, the four kinds of changes that look like patches but aren't, and the deprecation playbook that lets you evolve a public API without breaking the world.
Most teams install Husky, configure ten pre-commit checks, and disable the whole thing within a month because commits take 30 seconds. Here is the minimal pre-commit setup that catches real bugs, runs in under 2 seconds on the changed files only, and does not need a `--no-verify` workaround.