What I use, and how.

I treat my stack the way I treat training. You don't get faster by buying every gadget; you get faster by repeating a few simple things until they compound. A small kit you fully use beats a big one you half-use. Most "productivity" apps I added on top of the basics eventually became overhead I deleted — the equivalent of a closet full of supershoes you never actually race in.

So this is the short, honest list. Tools I've shipped real work with — across crypto, fintech, and startups, and on my own affiliate sites — plus a line on how each one actually fits. Some I touch daily. Some run in the background like a Zone 2 base: unglamorous, foundational, doing more than you'd guess.

The daily drivers

The handful I'd repurchase tomorrow. This is the engine room — where the AI workflows get built and the sites get shipped.

Claude is my thinking and building partner — drafting, refactoring, research, and most of my agent logic. Ollama handles the private, offline work I don't want leaving the machine. n8n (self-hosted on DigitalOcean, where I've been a customer for over a decade) is the glue between sites, data, and the AI calls. Astro on Cloudflare keeps everything static, fast, and cheap to run. I write code in Zed, live in Ghostty, and think in Obsidian before I build anything.

AI & LLMs

Where the agentic work happens. I build AI-native, not bolt-on: agents designed into the workflow from the start. The constant fight is against hallucination and AI slop — so I supply verified facts, keep a human gate before publish, and never let vibe coding ship straight to production.

Automation & workflows

The leverage layer. If a task is repeatable, it gets a workflow. If it needs judgment, I keep it. This is what turns one person into a portfolio — the flywheel that spins while I sleep.

Content engineering & SEO

Content as a system, not a sprint. Pipelines that produce and localize at scale, then optimize against the data. Built for negative splits — the back half of a content engine should run faster and cheaper than the front, not blow up.

CRM & lifecycle

The customer side of the flywheel. Segmentation, lifecycle journeys, and hyper-personalization that protect customer lifetime value — the same systems I ran for millions of users in fintech, now smaller and sharper.

Analytics & data

You can't optimize what you don't measure — same as you can't train without knowing your RPE. This is where conversion rate optimization and predictive AI live, and where I read the story the numbers are actually telling.

Paid media

Acquisition with attribution wired in from day one. Growth loops only compound if you can see what they cost and what they return.

Infrastructure & design

Deploy-and-forget infrastructure. The boring base that lets everything else stay fast.

Affiliate networks

The monetization layer behind my own sites — where build-in-public meets community-led growth, and where I test everything before I bring it to a client.