What I use to build Mani

Mac Studio M2 Ultra

Primary development machine. 64GB RAM handles everything from local AI inference to running the full Mani stack.

Apple Studio Display

Clean, color-accurate. Good for reviewing generated ad creative.

Keychron Q1 Pro

Mechanical keyboard. Quiet enough for calls, satisfying enough for all-day coding.

Herman Miller Aeron

The cliche exists for a reason. 12+ hour days need a real chair.

Cursor

Primary editor. The AI autocomplete genuinely saves hours per day on repetitive code patterns.

Claude Code

CLI agent for complex multi-file tasks. The agent that helps build the product that builds ads. Meta.

iTerm2 + zsh

Terminal of choice. tmux for session management, starship for prompt.

Biome

Linter and formatter. Replaced ESLint + Prettier. Faster, simpler, one config file.

Bun

JavaScript runtime and package manager. Replaced Node + npm. Everything is faster.

Figma

UI design and component library. The marketing site design system lives here.

Linear

Project management. Clean, fast, keyboard-driven. Every task maps to a PRD or bug report.

Slack

Team communication. Channels per project, threads for async decisions.

Loom

Async video for bug reports and feature walkthroughs. Worth 10x the typed explanation.

Resend

Transactional email. Clean API, good deliverability, honest pricing.

Railway

All production services. API, web, worker, Postgres, Redis. The deploy-on-push workflow is clean.

Cloudflare

DNS, CDN, DDoS protection. The free tier is absurdly generous.

GitHub

Code hosting and CI. GitHub Actions for production branch checks.

Anthropic (Claude)

Primary LLM for ad copy generation. Claude Sonnet for speed, Opus for complex creative strategy.

FairStack

Image generation via GPT Image 2. The creative-director package handles prompt construction and async polling.

Stripe

Payments. Checkout, subscriptions, invoicing. The API is genuinely good.

PostHog

Analytics and feature flags. Self-hostable, privacy-friendly, good free tier.