I Stopped Chasing Shiny Dev Tools — Here's What Actually Stuck in 2026

There's a specific kind of developer shame nobody talks about. It happens at 11pm. You're supposed to be finishing a feature. Instead, you're reading a Hacker News thread titled "Is Bun finally ready to replace Node?" and you have 14 tabs open — Bun's docs, a Reddit post comparing Deno vs Bun, a YouTube video you paused at 3 minutes, and a GitHub repo you starred but will never open again. Sound familiar? That was me. Every. Single. Month. I spent the better part of three years in what I now call the shiny tool loop, a cycle of discovery, excitement, shallow learning, abandonment, and guilt. New framework drops? I'm on it. New AI coding assistant? Installed by lunch. New build tool that promises to be "10x faster"? Benchmarks read. Migration started. Migration abandoned. My GitHub graveyard is full of half-migrated "test projects" with commit messages like chasing bun again and trying out astro (again). Then, in late 2025, I burned out. Not dramatically, just quietly. I sat down to wor