My current personal stack

The actual tools I use day to day, as of 2026-05.

Editor / IDE

• VS Code + Claude Code — daily driver. Claude Code's CLAUDE.md integration is the single most important productivity multiplier in my stack.
• Cursor — pulled out for big refactors where I want a stronger model + agent loop. Not the daily driver because the indexing pause on large repos is annoying.
• Vim — for quick edits over SSH or in repos I haven't set up. Always installed, rarely the primary.

AI

• Claude Opus 4.7 — primary thinking partner. Best for nuanced trade-offs and long-arc reasoning.
• ChatGPT-5 — secondary. Better at structured task decomposition; the worksheet output is uniquely good.
• Gemini 2.5 Pro — for diagrams and image-shaped tasks where Claude's multimodal is weaker.

Three because each one forgets the others' context. mdfy bridges that.

Capture

• mdfy — naturally. The dogfood URL is my actual working hub.
• Drafts — for raw thought capture on iOS. Drafts → "Append to mdfy" Shortcut → permanent URL.

Calendar / scheduling

• Cron — anti-meeting setup. I don't take same-week meetings except for fires.

Communication

• Slack — minimal, mostly read-only.
• Email — primary async. Long-form, no Slack threads.

Reading / research

• Reader (Readwise) — articles, PDFs, highlights flow into mdfy via a Shortcut.
• Arxiv-sanity — when I need to skim ML papers.

Health-of-the-loop

• Rise — sleep tracking. The numbers don't lie about whether I'm burning out.
• Cron blocks — first 90 minutes are "no Slack, no email, only build."

What I tried and dropped

• Notion — drifted out of it once mdfy was working. The flow was: write in mdfy, paste into Notion, never come back. Cut the middle step.
• Linear — overkill for a solo founder. GitHub issues are enough.
• Twitter as a feed — drains attention. I post; I don't read.