July 24, 2026 | Read online
The AI Stack I Actually Use Every Day (And What I Dropped)
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Hey,
Issue #015. Different format this week — no how-to, no code. Just an honest breakdown of what's actually in the stack after a year of trying everything.
🎥 Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/SakdCUoLcjE
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⚙️ THE STACK
The filter first. I evaluate every tool on three questions:
Does it save >30 min/week?
Is it reliable enough that I don't have to babysit it?
Does it fit where I already work (terminal, browser, phone)?
Most tools fail at least one. Here's what passed.
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Claude — the core
Everything else is peripheral. Three use cases:
Writing — narration scripts, newsletter drafts, PR descriptions.
Reasoning — debugging complex problems, architecture decisions, stress-testing plans.
Code review — the EP011 workflow. Every significant diff goes through Claude before a human sees it.
What I don't use it for: quick lookups. That's still a search engine. Claude is for synthesis, not retrieval.
Why Claude over GPT-4: larger context window, better reasoning on technical problems, more reliable instruction following. Not a religious position — it's what the work showed.
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Cursor — VS Code + Claude in the editor
The feature that matters isn't autocomplete — it's the ability to select a function, describe what you want to change in plain English, and have the model rewrite it. You review the diff, accept or reject.
It's an amplifier, not a replacement. You still need to understand what you're asking for.
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OpenClaw + Telegram — the background process
Fifteen episodes. Every newsletter. Every social post. All routed through OpenClaw. I covered the full setup in EP008 and EP010.
What I'll add: after a year, it's the tool that surprised me most. I expected a useful chatbot. I got something closer to a background process — it manages tasks, surfaces reminders, executes workflows while I'm doing other things. The Telegram interface means it's always in my pocket.
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edge-tts — free TTS that sounds like a person
Free command-line tool. No API key. Runs locally. Powers every video on this channel.
pip install edge-tts
edge-tts --voice en-US-AndrewNeural --rate=-5% --text "your text" --write-media output.mp3
Use this before paying for ElevenLabs.
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⚠️ WHAT GOT DROPPED
GitHub Copilot — replaced by Cursor. Copilot is autocomplete. Cursor is a conversation.
Jasper — generic output, slow, cost more than Claude. Gone after two weeks.
Chrome extensions — replaced by opening Claude in a tab and pasting.
Midjourney — the Deploy or Die aesthetic is terminal and text. Didn't fit.
The pattern: every dropped tool either overlapped with something I had, required too much setup, or produced output I didn't use.
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💰 MONEY MOVE
The stack costs ~$40/month (Claude Pro + Cursor). Edge-tts and OpenClaw are free. That's the full production cost for fifteen YouTube episodes, a newsletter, and a social presence.
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⛓️ CRYPTO/WEB3 SIGNAL
The same amplifier effect applies in on-chain dev. Cursor with Solidity support, Claude for pre-audit contract review, automated test generation for DeFi protocols. It speeds up engineers who know what they're doing. It accelerates bugs for those who don't.
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🔗 3 LINKS WORTH YOUR TIME
edge-tts on GitHub — free TTS, no API key
Cursor — VS Code with Claude in the editor