For better or worse, I've been tinkering on products for years. Some come to life, most fail, but always rattle in my head.
Cliche to say but AI has allowed much of what I wanted to build become something I could build. Interestingly, my son has been able to do the same thing with his 3D printer (especially with tools like Meshy to be able to simply "chat out" what you want to make).
This guide is my ever-evolving resource to how I code in the age of AI tools. The reality is that there are many ways to code (just go to YouTube for proof) — this just happens to be my organic, iterated and iterative way.
The minimally viable tools
Here's the stack I reach for on every project:
• GitHub — Store all source code for all projects and the incremental changes.
• Visual Studio Code — It's free, it's extendable, and it works.
• Cline — The AI engine of VS Code. Without it, I'm coding like it's 2024.
• GitHub Copilot — Code assist when I'm driving myself.
• Neon — An agnostic simple database-as-a-service product. Create a database, get a connection string, and go.
• Render — Web service hosting that lets me spin up products and host them very fast.
• Postmark — Most things I make need email (one-time passcodes, registration confirmation, etc). Easy to configure and get going in minutes.
• Cloudflare — Everything lives on a domain that needs to be pointed at IPs. Cloudflare is king at this, free, and has bells and whistles if I need them.
• Notion — Fastest idea-to-paper tool. Before building anything, I organize thoughts and shuffle them around.
• Anthropic — Bring the API into Cline to do the heavy lifting/thinking.
• Grok — Help find general answers to questions.
• TablePlus — If I need to access the database from my computer, TablePlus is best.
Beyond the tools above, products have their own special idiosyncratic requirements necessitating some other vendor. But the tools above are the essentials in my mind.
Building hacky first drafts
A hacky first draft could be a single page website or a full blown web application with login and all. Whatever it is, here's my step-by-step for getting from an idea to booted-up thing.
1. Create a Notion page for "thing" (it could be a project, product, contraption or a whole fleshed out business idea with a hypothesized business model).
2. Write a "business idea/initial product description" sub-page with some inkling of how the thing would work and how it could potentially make money.
3. Run the business idea aspect through Grok to get their not-so-humble opinion (which is good because I shouldn't be wasting time on shitty ideas no matter how fast they can be built).
4. Polish the initial product description through Grok to turn into a more functional document.
5. Create a GitHub repo, open the folder in VS Code, and save it as a workspace.
6. Install Cline into VS Code (if I don't have it already) — configure it with an Anthropic API Key and custom instructions.
7. Configure Cline with several MCP servers so it can access resources on demand (GitHub MCP, Render MCP, Neon MCP, PostgreSQL MCP).
8. Open Cline in Plan mode and feed in the product specs. Work with Cline to flesh out the dev plan. Because we've seeded things with .clinerules, this keeps things on-rail from the start.
9. Move to Act mode once things look good. By default Cline steps through most actions (valuable for reviewing changes), but at some point you can turn on cruise-control by auto-approving some actions.
10. The first build typically requires some further setup (database connection strings, moving environment files, etc).
11. First build live!
MCPs
MCPs are cool because they add next-level automation to projects. I can instruct Cline to commit the code to the GitHub repository which could kick off a deployment process to Render. Or I can turn off auto-deploy in Render and I can then instruct Cline to commit the code to GitHub, run some tests and only if the tests pass, then deploy the service to Render.
Other tools worth mentioning
• v0.dev — Great for quick UI prototyping.
• Retool — Good for reporting/admin dashboard stuff.
• Skyvern — Good for automated browser testing, especially with Retool workflows.
• Visualping — Good for uptime monitoring from a top-down approach.
• n8n.io — Workflow automation.
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