Our tooling philosophy
We stopped chasing new tools every week. A tool enters our stack only if it replaces 2 existing tools OR unlocks a previously impossible use case.
The 8 essential tools
Cursor: the AI code editor
Cursor replaced VS Code in our team. The Claude and GPT-4 integration accelerates development by 30-50%, especially for navigating existing codebases.
LangSmith: agent monitoring
Impossible to do serious production work without LangSmith. Every LLM call traced, cost per request, latency, error rate.
Supabase: the AI database
PostgreSQL with pgvector extension, built-in auth, auto-generated API. Our default choice for any AI project requiring storage.
Langfuse: the open source alternative
For projects where data cannot leave the client's infrastructure: open source, self-hostable, functionally equivalent to LangSmith.
5-8: dbt, Metabase, n8n, Unsloth
dbt for versioned SQL data transformation. Metabase for non-technical dashboards. n8n for no-code automation. Unsloth for open source LLM fine-tuning.
Our advice: master 5 tools deeply rather than knowing 20 superficially. Value is in the combination and integration.
Most of the tools on this list are used in real conditions during the AI Engineering Bootcamp.
