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STACK ATTACK #1

Stack Attack #1

Noah Brown writes a thing on LinkedIn called Stack Attack — a diff of his tool stack every few weeks. Tight, useful format. I'm stealing it.

Quick diff of how my stack has shifted in the last 3–4 weeks.

Before (a month ago)

  • Claude Code
  • Personal notes scattered across Obsidian, Apple Notes, and Things
  • Slack
  • Linear
  • ChatGPT (one-off questions)
  • Things 3
  • Obsidian
  • Physical journal (daily musings)
  • Apple Notes (shared with friends and family)
  • Granola
  • Google Calendar
  • Raycast
  • Cursor (personal)
  • Warp (work)
  • Figma
  • BigQuery (raw queries via Claude Code)
  • elliottchang.me (mostly dormant)

New

  • Claude Code — still the surface. More of everything goes through it.
  • chang-os — formalized product repo. Skills, anchors, journals, brand, rhythm files, customer notes, decisions. (new — biggest shift)
  • Slack
  • Linear
  • ChatGPT — gone. Replaced by Claude Code being wired directly into the repo. (removed)
  • Codex — handed Weebo M1 to it via a versioned prompt artifact. The build hand to Claude Code's thinking hand. (new)
  • Dia Browser — AI-enabled browsing. Game changer for pulling context off pages and into the workflow. (new)
  • Things 3 — still tasks. iOS Shortcut for voice capture during the day; triage next morning.
  • Obsidian — durable thinking and structured notes. Starting to feel duplicative with chang-os. Watching it.
  • Physical journal — daily musings. Paper, by hand. The one place the loop is fully analog and stays mine.
  • Apple Notes — the shareable layer. Notes I want to send to friends or family.
  • Granola
  • Google Calendar
  • Raycast
  • Cursor — back and forth. Personal projects only.
  • Warp — work.
  • Figma — now powered via Claude. Claude Design will probably take over completely once they remove the usage caps. (new way of using it)
  • Postgres-prod / BigQuery — wrapped in skills (/prod-data, /dig, /transfer-analysis, /customer-coverage-review). The data layer became programmable. (new wrapper)
  • elliottchang.me — re-positioned. From dormant personal site to the public output layer for chang-os.

What actually changed

The shift that mattered most this month wasn't a tool — it was deciding the product repo is the operating system. Skills, anchors, customer notes, brand decisions, rhythm files — all in one place, all readable by an agent. Same architecture Noah described at Knot: files retrieved as context in agent workflows. I'm a team of one for now, so the workflows are mine. But the pattern compounds.

The other shift, less visible: the rhythm files — anchors.md, quarter.md, today.md, weekly.md. They're not tools in the usual sense. But they're the reason the rest of the stack does anything I'd call work, instead of the optimization of the empty.

What I'm watching

  • Whether chang-os absorbs Obsidian over time, or whether they stay separate because they serve different selves. (The physical journal and Apple Notes aren't going anywhere — paper is paper, and the shareable layer needs to live where the people are.)
  • Whether Codex + Claude Code stays a clean two-handed split (thinking hand / build hand), or whether one absorbs the other.
  • Whether Claude Design ends up replacing Figma entirely once the caps lift — and what that does to the design loop.
  • Whether the rhythm files end up being the load-bearing thing in the whole stack.

Next snapshot when something material moves. Probably 3–4 weeks.

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