The Case for Dev Tool Minimalism: Why Fewer Features Win

The article argues that the best developer tools follow the Unix philosophy of doing one thing well, rather than accumulating features that degrade performance, complicate onboarding, and increase maintenance burden. The author illustrates this with their own product TokenBar, a focused Mac menu bar tool that only displays real-time LLM token costs, and shares a practical framework for resisting feature creep as a solo developer.