The stack
The tools I
actually run.
Not a list of everything that exists. The short list that earns its place, with honest setup notes, kept current as the stack changes.
Some of these are referral links, marked as such, disclosed on the line you click. Nothing appears here because of a commission and nothing is written differently because of one. Referral links never appear inside the newsletter reviews themselves. If a tool stops earning its place, it comes off the list.
- Agents Claude Code Anthropic's coding agent, in the terminal and the editor. Most of what appears in The Build is written, tested and broken here first.
- Infrastructure Railway referral Deploys apps, databases and workers straight from a repository. Where the side projects live. Postgres, cron and background workers without the console archaeology. You get $20 in credits to start. It is a referral link, so I earn a small cut if you stay.
- Web Astro Static site framework that ships almost no JavaScript. This page is built with it. The whole site is a handful of components.
- Web Tailwind CSS Utility-first styling with the design tokens in one file. Palette, type scale and easing curves all live in a single theme block.
- Publishing Substack Where the newsletter is written and delivered. Boring on purpose. Writing is the hard part, not the mail server.