Jeff Bailey | Developer Tools

What Is fzf?

Jeff Bailey — Sat, 25 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I used to open files the slow way: cd into a directory, ls to see what’s there, maybe find with a half-remembered filename, then pass it to whatever program I needed. Every time, I’d lose a few seconds hunting for the right path. Multiply that by dozens of files a day, and it adds up to real friction.

Then I found fzf, and file selection stopped being a chore. fzf is a fuzzy finder that turns file selection into a fast, interactive search.

What Is Zoxide?

Jeff Bailey — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I used to navigate my filesystem one directory at a time. cd ~/Projects, then ls, then cd websites, then ls, then cd jeffbaileyblog, then ls, then cd hugo. Every trip to a familiar directory cost me four or five commands. Tab-completion helped a little, but I still had to remember the path.

Then I installed zoxide, and cd started reading my mind.

What zoxide actually is

Zoxide is a smarter replacement for cd. It watches where you go in your terminal, ranks those directories by how often and how recently you visit them, and lets you jump to any of them by typing a fragment of the path.

What Is Claude Code?

Jeff Bailey — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

For years, “AI in my editor” meant autocomplete. Copilot would suggest the next few tokens, I’d hit tab, and that was the interaction. Useful, but shallow. The AI stayed in one file, ignored my tests, and had no way to know when its suggestion broke the build.

Claude Code works at a different level. It runs in my terminal, reads my files, runs my commands, and talks back in plain language. When I ask it to fix a failing test, it runs the test, reads the failure, finds the bug, edits the file, and runs the test again to confirm. The result feels less like autocomplete and more like delegating a small task to a teammate.