Stack

Tools I lean on.

Nothing exotic. The tools that survive a few months of daily use. Strikethrough is what I've moved on from.

Daily desktop

  • Obsidian: local-first second brain. Critical: Rift is built on top of it
  • Figma: UX & visual design
  • Paper: sketching layouts and live design with the Paper Desktop MCP
  • Codex: daily coding agent
  • Raycast: launcher, snippets, custom commands
  • Hammerspoon: macOS automation in Lua
  • Ghostty: terminal
  • Shottr: screenshots and quick annotations
  • Cursor: replaced by Codex + Claude Code
  • Claude Desktop: moved to the CLI
  • ChatGPT: replaced by Claude + Codex

Code editor & AI

  • VS Code: primary editor
  • Codex: coding agent in the terminal
  • Claude Code: the other coding agent. Often run side-by-side with Codex
  • MLX: Apple's ML framework: local fine-tuning and inference on the M5
  • LM Studio: quick local LLM playground
  • Ollama: local model runtime when I need to script it

MCP servers

  • Rift: my personal context system. Decisions, conversations, projects, searchable from any agent
  • Google Ads: critical. A field note on this is coming
  • Google Search Console: where SEO actually lives
  • GA4: Google Analytics 4, queryable from the agent
  • Excalidraw: quick mockups and diagrams
  • Webflow: customer sites, agent-driven edits
  • ComfyUI: image generation pipelines
  • Claap: customer calls and async video, queryable transcripts
  • Notion: read & write client docs without leaving the agent
  • HubSpot: CRM access for client work
  • Ahrefs: backlink + keyword data, queryable
  • Paper Desktop: design directly from the agent