Learn · Developer tools
A code editor is the program developers write code in. A basic editor is a smart text editor for code. An IDE (integrated development environment) adds more: debugging, testing, and project tools in one place. Visual Studio Code is the most popular editor in 2026, and AI-assisted editors have become common.
Good editors speed up work with syntax highlighting, autocomplete, error hints, and integration with Git and the terminal. The gap between a plain text editor and a proper coding editor is large in day-to-day productivity.
As of 2026, AI features are built into most editors, suggesting code and answering questions inline, and some editors are AI-first. The tool is a personal choice, but a modern editor with good language support and AI assistance is standard.
Updated July 2026
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A tech stack is the set of technologies a product is built with: the language, framework, database, and hosting. Choose based on what you're building, your team's skills, the ecosystem's maturity, and the ability to hire people who know it, not on what's newest or most talked about.
A linter automatically checks code for likely mistakes, risky patterns, and style issues as you write. A formatter automatically arranges code consistently (spacing, indentation, quotes). Together they catch small errors early and keep a codebase uniform, so it reads as if one person wrote it.
Git is the standard tool for tracking changes to code. It records every edit as a snapshot, so a team can work on the same project at once, see who changed what, and roll back to any earlier version. Almost every software project uses it. Working without it is like writing without an undo button.
Git is the tool that tracks code changes on your computer. GitHub is an online service that hosts Git projects so teams can store, share, and collaborate on them in the cloud. Git is the technology, GitHub is a popular place to keep and work on Git projects. GitLab and Bitbucket are alternatives.
Version control is the practice of recording every change to a project over time, so you can see its history, work in parallel, and undo mistakes. Git is the dominant version-control system. It matters because it turns code from a fragile single copy into a safe, traceable, collaborative thing.
CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) is an automated pipeline that checks and ships code. When a developer pushes a change, CI automatically runs tests and checks to catch problems, and CD automatically deploys the change if it passes. It makes releasing software faster, safer, and routine.