I deleted tmux, Copilot, and WSL. My productivity exploded

March was a strange month here on the blog. I published seven technical posts in three weeks, all about tooling: tmux, Warp, Makefile, WSL, Git aliases, AWS AMIs, malware detection. It was the most productive month the blog has ever had, at least in terms of volume.

On the 31st I closed the laptop, went to bed, and woke up with an uncomfortable question: I wrote seven productivity guides, but am I actually more productive than I was in February?

The answer, after 40 minutes making coffee and staring at a wall, was no.

This post is about what happened the next day.

The diagnosis nobody wanted to hear

I opened the laptop and spent an hour just looking at the macOS home screen. I counted the things running in the background:

• tmux with 4 open sessions, 9 windows, and 17 panes
• Warp with AI enabled, 3 command blocks waiting for input
• GoLand and WebStorm open at the same time (on different projects)
• Copilot running in both, plus Claude Code in the terminal
• Raycast, Rectangle, Alfred (yes, I have all three), Karabiner, Hammerspoon
• Two browsers (Chrome for work, Firefox for personal) with 47 tabs
• Docker Desktop eating 6GB of RAM without a single container running

I had spent all of March writing about how to use these tools better. And the question that stopped me in my tracks was: why do I need all of this to write a for loop?

I closed the laptop again.

The decision

On Monday, April 1st, I did the most radical thing I’ve done in 15 years of my career: I opened the terminal and ran, in this order:

brew uninstall tmux
brew uninstall --cask warp
brew uninstall --cask goland
brew uninstall --cask webstorm
brew uninstall --cask docker
rm -rf ~/.oh-my-zsh
rm -rf ~/.tmux.conf
rm -rf ~/.config/karabiner
rm -rf ~/.config/raycast
rm -rf ~/.ssh/config

The last one hurt the most. My ~/.ssh/config had 84 lines of aliases for bastion hosts, tunnels, port-forwards. All down the drain.

Then I went to Chrome and closed all 47 tabs at once with Cmd + Shift + W. Closed my Copilot account. Cancelled Claude Pro. Cancelled ChatGPT Plus. Cancelled Cursor (which I don’t even use, but it was sitting there, charging 20 dollars a month).

My dock was down to three icons: Finder, Safari, and TextEdit.

The new setup

This is the part that will hurt anyone who read my post about Warp and my complete guide to tmux. My sincere apologies.

My current setup is:

• Editor: TextEdit (the one that ships with macOS, in plain text mode)
• Terminal: Terminal.app (the one that ships with macOS, default theme)
• Shell: bash (the macOS default, no customization)
• Git: pure command line, zero aliases
• Browser: Safari with just one tab at a time
• AI: none, nothing, zero

And one thing I thought I’d never do: I went back to printing documentation on paper. I bought a multifunction printer at the office supply store.

The first 48 hours

They were hard. I tried to run tm (my alias for tmux new-session) about 30 times. I tried to open the Raycast palette with Cmd + Space and landed on Spotlight (which, by the way, is great, I had forgotten). I tried to autocomplete a git checkout and bash simply… didn’t autocomplete. I had to type feature/GH-2847-add-translation-key-to-taxonomies in full, letter by letter.

On the second day I wrote a Go function without Copilot suggesting anything. It took me 14 minutes for a 22-line function. With my previous setup, using Copilot + GoLand + gopls, I would have finished it in 3 minutes.

And here’s where it starts to get interesting.

What I discovered

That 14-minute function had zero bugs. The one I would have written in 3 minutes with Copilot would have had, at minimum, an err == nil in the wrong place (Copilot loves to do that), a defer I’d have forgotten to check, and probably a goroutine without context cancellation.

I spent the rest of the week timing myself. The numbers are here:

I wrote less code. Opened fewer PRs. Spent less time in front of the laptop. And delivered more value than in any week of March.

I could feel the ground shifting under my feet.

The theory I never wanted to face

I spent years evangelizing productivity through tooling. “Use tmux, use Warp, use Copilot, use Makefile, automate everything.” The posts are right there, you can go read them. I believed (I believe?) every word.

But there’s one thing none of those guides talks about: optimizing your setup is a sophisticated form of procrastination. Every hour I spent configuring a new shortcut in Karabiner, remapping a key in tmux, tuning the Oh My Zsh prompt, was an hour I wasn’t writing software anyone was going to use.

Worse: every new tool came with a hidden cognitive cost. Copilot made me stop thinking before writing. tmux made me open 9 windows when I only needed 1. Warp made me scroll through history instead of paying attention to the current command. Raycast made me confuse “launching an app” with “doing work.” I was fast at everything except what mattered.

The first day without any tools was the first day I had to, actually, stop and think before typing. And that’s where the work happens.

The manifesto

After a week I wrote a personal manifesto, in a physical notebook (black Moleskine, 2B pencil). I’m reproducing it here:

1. No tool I can’t explain in one sentence to a non-technical person
2. No shortcut I learned in the last month
3. No plugin running in the background
4. No autocomplete that suggests more than the next word
5. No terminal that doesn’t fit in 80 columns
6. No editor with more buttons than an elevator
7. No AI that decides what I was going to write before me

If you’re reading this and felt a chill down your spine, it’s because you know you’re right.

What’s coming next

Over the next 30 days I’ll publish a series of posts about what I’m learning in this transition. The topics already planned:

• How to write Go without an LSP: why godoc exists and why you should read the whole thing
• Git by command line: every alias you have, and why you don’t need any of them
• The return of paper: my favorite stationery in São Paulo and how to set up a bullet journal for a dev
• Pure bash: the shell your grandpa used, that still works better than yours
• Uninstalling Docker: how to run everything natively (spoiler: you don’t need all of it)

If you want to follow along, subscribe to the newsletter. If you don’t, that’s fine too, I kind of get it.

One last thing

Oh, yes. There’s one small thing I need to confess before wrapping up.

I wrote this post in WebStorm, with Copilot suggesting four out of every five sentences, running in tmux inside Warp, with Docker Desktop consuming 8GB of RAM in the background, Claude Code open in a parallel session generating ideas for this joke, and Spotify playing a playlist that Raycast opened for me.

Happy April Fools. I’ll be back Friday with actual content, including the complete guide to GitHub Copilot in WebStorm.

Oh, and the Moleskine is real. I actually did buy one. Use it for drawing, not for writing code.