What we actually run, day to day.
Following the /uses convention. Concrete brands, honest preferences, no affiliate links. Last refreshed 4 Jun 2026 — we update this when something genuinely changes, not when a sponsor asks.
The build side.
Daily driver
16-inch MacBook Pro (M3 Pro, 36 GB). Pixel 8 for personal, a second cheap Android purely for WhatsApp Business testing. One Dell U2723QE 4K monitor; I refuse to add a second — two screens make me context-switch worse, not better. macOS Sonoma, Karabiner remapping caps-lock to escape.
Code
I code in Cursor — Claude as the model, GPT only when I need a second opinion on a tricky refactor. Python 3.11 for everything backend, FastAPI for HTTP, plain HTML/CSS/JS for this site (no framework, on purpose). Shell is zsh with Starship; tmux for long-running sessions. Git via the CLI, never a GUI.
AI stack
Anthropic API on the Build tier, Claude Sonnet 4.7 for production agents, Haiku for cheap classification. Claude Agent SDK for harnesses we build for ourselves. Free-tier Gemini for non-billing experiments (the file finder runs on it). Embeddings: text-embedding-3-small when we need OpenAI, BGE-small when we want to run local. We do not use LangChain.
Shipping
Frontend on Cloudflare Pages (static, with a cPanel mirror for the marketing site). Backend on Render — simple, predictable, no Kubernetes brain damage at this scale. GitHub Actions for CI; if a workflow needs more than 40 lines of YAML I rewrite it as a shell script. SQLite in production for the bot; Postgres only when a client genuinely needs it.
Comms
WhatsApp Business for clients, Gmail for everything contractual, Google Calendar because the whole world is already on it. Linear for our own roadmap. Notion only when a client insists.
Tools we built ourselves
Chronos CA (tax-notice automation, Electron + Python, runs local). Chronomation Sales Agent (WhatsApp bot, the chronomation codebase). A cross-device file finder, 13-stage retrieval, my personal productivity weapon. We dogfood every one of them.
The run-the-company side.
Daily driver
MacBook Air M2 (16 GB) for travel-weight reasons; I'm rarely at a desk. iPhone 15, AirPods Pro for calls. One portable LG monitor I plug in at hotels. iOS 17, no jailbreak, boring on purpose.
Code
VS Code when I have to read the codebase (which is more than you'd think — I write our scenario test files in plain text and hand them to Aman). Bash as my shell. We don't agree on Vim — Aman thinks it's faster, I think life's too short.
AI stack
Claude in the browser, daily — for sales triage, draft proposals, summarising long client threads. NotebookLM for client research before a 2-day embed (drops calls, market snapshots, competitor sites into one pane). I do not run agents myself; that's Aman's department.
Shipping
I don't ship code. I ship clients. The closest I get to "deploy" is hitting "Send" on a quote.
Comms
WhatsApp Business as the primary client channel — every inbound starts there. Google Calendar (synced to Apple), Gmail with Superhuman on top because I live in inbox. Razorpay for invoicing. Zoho Books for accounting once it gets past spreadsheets.
Tools we built ourselves
The Sales Agent runs my own WhatsApp pipeline first — every feature gets tested against my real inbound before a client sees it. If it embarrasses me, it doesn't ship.
What we deliberately don't use.
No Slack (WhatsApp wins for a 2-person team). No Jira (Linear is enough). No Figma for code handoff (we design in the browser). No LangChain. No vector-DB-as-a-service for sub-5k document collections — SQLite with FTS5 outperforms the marketing copy. We're a small team and the toolchain reflects that.