The author uses APIs extensively in their development work and finds tools like Postman helpful but prefers a more integrated solution that runs continuously in the terminal, allowing for easy access to API data without an additional program running. They created a Node.js module to help with this, but ultimately decided to write a shell script instead due to its simplicity and flexibility, which they can now use to quickly access data from Contentful by parsing a JSON configuration file using the `jq` module. This has saved them time and enabled them to focus on more important tasks, highlighting the benefits of shell scripting for productivity.