Coding stack - Dec 2024
2024-12-13
My coding stack as of December 2024 looks like this:
I keep a running Google doc that functions roughly like a PRD:
- What’s the product — what’s the vision, where does it stand today, what am I building towards
- What’s the current project — e.g., set up a system for taking a pdf, extracting the text, and then organizing it in a way that’s useful to the rest of my app
- What’s part of the current project am I working on — at the moment, squashing a bug related to super large files
- Any files that I can’t upload directly to the Claude project (e.g., my prisma database schema)
I have this connected to a Claude project so it stays synced. In this Claude project, I’ve got the ~5-10 most critical files for the project at hand also uploaded.
In my Claude project, I’ve got some background information about my tech stack (e.g., NextJS app, I’m using yarn, not npm, I’m on a mac) and some guidance (I want you to challenge my thinking rather than flatter me; ask questions if you have them; I prefer simple solutions).
I sit down and start chatting with Claude on whatever I happen to be working on (at the moment, uploading PDF files and extracting key data). I chat through different considerations and then create or update a file. I’m using Cursor as my text editor, but really only rarely using the AI features at this point as I was running into too many places where it would spiral off and start making changes I didn’t need and couldn’t follow. Claude feels better at staying on the task at hand. I probably won’t re-up my subscription when it’s done.
I usually code in 2-3 hour blocks. When one of these blocks is ending, I ask Claude to summarize what we’ve been working on:
- What we accomplished today
- What the next steps are
- What the 5 most important pieces of context would be for them to get started again
I then paste this into my Google doc and I’m done for the day, picking back up at the beginning the next day.