8 Open-Source Tools That Save Solo Developers Hours Every Week

Most "developer productivity" lists rank tools by GitHub stars. That's not how time actually gets saved. The real time sinks for solo developers aren't slow autocomplete or missing keyboard shortcuts. They're the invisible taxes: three hours configuring a backend before writing a line of product code, half a day debugging a secrets leak, an afternoon building glue code that was "temporary" and now runs in production. The right stack doesn't make existing work faster — it eliminates entire catego