Not a sponsored roundup. This is the actual stack I use to build CrimsonWatch and freelance client work, what earns its spot, and what I tried and quietly stopped using.
I moved fast on a feature for CrimsonWatch and let AI drive most of it. It worked, it looked done, and it quietly skipped an authorization check I would have caught if I'd written it myself.
A few months ago I wrote about what I fix every time AI writes code for me. Half a year later, the list is shorter, but the job got harder in a different way.
I gave an AI agent a scoped task on CrimsonWatch and walked away for an hour instead of watching every step. It finished the task. It also quietly broke three things I didn't ask it to touch.
Eleven AI models launched in twenty days this month. I stopped tracking the leaderboard and started asking a better question: what happens when good AI is cheap for everyone?
I build with AI tools daily, Claude for heavy lifting and Gemini CLI for quick iteration. They’ve made me faster in ways I couldn’t have imagined two years ago.
How I cut my codebase by 30% and finally understood the hype.