The non-coder founder’s stack, 2026 edition
A practical, opinionated tour of the tools I use to ship production software without writing code.
The premise
I no longer write code. I have not written production code in eighteen months. Every line in CAIA, every line in Stolution, every line in this website was written by an AI under my direction.
This is not a hedge. It is a deliberate choice. Twenty-five years of writing code earned me the right to stop, and the lived expertise to direct the writing without doing it.
The stack, briefly
- Claude Code for the inside-the-IDE work. Multi-file refactors, test-driven loops, large-context reasoning.
- Cursor for the line-level work. Tab-completion that knows the codebase. The auto-import that just works.
- Aider for the long-running, agentic tasks. Spec a feature, walk away, come back to a pull request.
- Claude (the chat product) for architecture and writing. The peer in the room.
- GitHub Codespaces for the everything-else. Reproducible, disposable, paid-for-by-the-hour.
What does not work
The "build me an app" demos do not work for production software. They work for landing pages. The reason is not the model — the reason is that production software is not a single artifact. It is a thicket of integrations, edge cases, and political concessions.
What does work
The model is best at the parts of software engineering that are well-specified and well-bounded. The parts a senior engineer would do with their eyes closed. The interesting work — figuring out what to build — is still human work. The model is a peer for that, not a replacement.
Filed in AI Coding Tools
Tags: Founder · AI tooling · CAIA