The Pragmatic Stack: What a Solo Developer Actually Uses Daily

This firsthand account cuts through the hype of bloated developer toolchains, showing that solo shipping doesn't require CI/CD, staging environments, or Figma. By strategically using local AI (Ollama for boilerplate) alongside targeted cloud AI (Claude for hard problems), the author demonstrates how pragmatic tool selection—keeping only what justifies its overhead—enables serious, multi-app production work. For developers evaluating their own stacks, it's a rare honest look at what truly works versus what's fashionable.