Over the past couple of months, my development desktop has gradually changed into its new form. This is the interweaving of AI into almost all of my workflows. I have a widescreen main monitor that I do most of my “concentration” work on, positioned in the middle of three monitors on my home desktop setup. The two flanking monitors are usually for reference material or chat sessions related to whatever I am working on.

About 80% of my coding is in the .NET ecosystem. A combination of VS Code and full Visual Studio is used for most development work. My widescreen monitor used to be split 50/50, with either IDE on the left side and either SSMS or Chrome with DevTools open on the other side for whatever I was working on. It has been this way for probably the last decade.

Over the past year, a shift into a new development mode has slowly taken shape. The terminal/console is now on the left hand side of the screen at about 40% width. It contains various tabs for areas of code, and within those, experimentation with tmux has begun to break them into smaller sessions inside those code areas. For the majority of those sessions, Claude CLI is running, with the others running Gemini CLI. The remaining screen space is now roughly 50% IDE or 50% Chrome with DevTools.

Just as the job has shifted, so has the desktop. It is interesting to look back at the evolution, and equally interesting to imagine what it will look like going forward.