The wrong question
People ask what stack are you on? as if a vendor list were the answer. That is the wrong question.
The right question is what harness lets you bring ideas to life under God's headship — tools wired together, habits formed, discernment practiced — without making models into lords or fear into fuel. That is the same axis as bootstrap in What We Mean by Bootstrap: capability under headship, not a shopping list.
This entry is my expedition log snapshot of that harness. It will age. Incompleteness is the design.
What passes the gate
Everything here passed the public dual test: people served, headship honored. Inside my private operational filter, I also ask: does this help bring ideas to life faster, or does it just look organized? That filter is mine; the dual test is what you can hold me accountable to here.
If a tool fails either test, it gets pruned — not deleted from memory, but moved to compost.
What I'm eating now
AI layer
Cursor is the desk; models are swapped, not a single named brain.
| Tool | Why it stayed |
|---|---|
| Cursor | Daily IDE AI — Composer 2.5 most for budget; also switch among Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and others as the task needs |
| OpenRouter | Programmatic access to most models at lower cost than UI tiers — agents route through it instead of paying chat subscriptions for everything |
| Claude Code | High on the radar — beginning to bring it into the loop; not yet the daily driver |
| Abacus | Legacy host for a few sites — migrating to GitHub + Vercel; one line, not a destination |
Everything else — by job
Author and ship: GitHub, Cursor, Expo Application Services (EAS) with GitHub Actions (GHA), Vercel for web.
Trust and reach: Resend (email), Twilio (phone validation), Doppler (secrets), Neon (Postgres with tight Vercel integration), Cloudflare (edge protection for exposed services like Model Context Protocol (MCP)). For the fuller site/app vendor inventory — free-tier bootstrap infra, security bar, what got composted — see Bootstrap Infrastructure.
Calendar and cloud: Google Cloud — OAuth home for Google Calendar (gcal) integrations. A private overseer program reads gcal (read-only) for domain workflows; the calendar is input, not the product.
Stores: Apple and Android app stores via EAS + GHA.
Internal runtime: Hostinger Virtual Private Server (VPS) — private overseer program and org MCP studio; not part of the public STN surface.
The constellation outside the model
Raw models are generic. Value scales when context is you-shaped.
I maintain a constellation of repos and notes encoding how I actually learn: why and what before how, agile-first. It is not a catalog to publish; it is externalized memory agents draw on.
Obsidian is my notes vault — fifteen years of notes. It is the surface where generated information becomes mine: overseer lenses, daily notes, distilled output I can act on.
Cursor rules, org GitHub repos, and MCP brand docs let an LLM turn data into custom information that interfaces into me fast — orders of magnitude faster than generic chat. This is where the magic happens — not in the model alone, but in the harness around it.
One workflow, end to end
For pet-sitting operations: calendar events in gcal → overseer lens (read-only analysis) → vault note with capacity and narrative → I act. No client names, no internal hostnames — just the pattern: signal from calendar → structured note → human judgment.
The loop I actually run
- Jam (Plan mode in Cursor) — philosophy and structure before code. Some of the best hours are here.
- Build (Multitask) — execute the plan; stay conceptually literate without reading every line.
- Struggle — sometimes God withholds the easy AI path. Manual afternoons teach things speed would skip. I have never regretted the lesson — only the grumbling on the way through.
- Context hygiene — fresh sessions to avoid bloat; the constellation carries memory between them.
- Ship — commit, promote up the branch ladder, deploy: web to Vercel via GHA; apps to stores via EAS + GHA.
Keep the lights on (KTLO) — automate the plague
KTLO work gets automated and watched, not babysat. The overseer surfaces status into the vault when intervention is needed — green stays quiet; red gets a human. Creative energy stays on the garden, not plumbing.
Still tending
This harness snapshot is growing — not evergreen. Tools will change; Foundation will not. When you read a newer entry, compare against the dual test, not against hype.
See also: Bootstrap Infrastructure · What We Mean by Bootstrap · A Tool for My Calling · The Foundation · Who This Is For