Stack playbooks
Pick a stack on purpose
Each playbook covers the circumstances that justify it, why the pieces work together, architectural examples, and the tradeoff that should send you elsewhere.
Vite + React + Supabase + Vercel
A short path from idea to a real product with auth, a database, and a public URL.
skip if — you need server-rendered marketing pages for SEO, or if your authorization rules are too complex to express as row policies.
Next.js + Postgres + Prisma + Vercel
The default choice when you need SEO, server rendering, and typed database access in one codebase.
skip if — your app is a purely internal dashboard behind a login — the server rendering cost buys you SEO you will never use.
Astro + Markdown + CDN
Content sites that stay fast because there is almost no JavaScript to ship.
skip if — the page content depends on who is logged in — personalization fights a fully static build.
WordPress + managed hosting
Hard to beat when non-developers must publish daily and the budget favors plugins over engineers.
skip if — the product is an application rather than a site — app-like state in WordPress means fighting the platform every sprint.
React Native + Expo
One TypeScript codebase for iOS and Android when the app is mostly screens, lists, and forms.
skip if — the product depends on heavy custom rendering, sustained background processing, or bleeding-edge OS features on day one.
Turborepo + pnpm + shared UI package
For teams running several apps that must look and behave like one product.
skip if — you have one app and one team — a monorepo adds tooling overhead that only pays off across multiple consumers.
Tauri + React + SQLite
Small, fast desktop apps built with web skills, with data stored on the user's machine.
skip if — you need pixel-identical rendering on every OS or rely on Chromium-only APIs — each platform's webview differs, and Electron is the safer bet there.
FastAPI + Postgres + SQLAlchemy
A typed Python API for when your data work, ML models, or team already live in Python.
skip if — the whole team writes TypeScript and there's no Python-specific work — a TypeScript backend keeps one language and shares types with the frontend.
Phaser + TypeScript + Vite
2D games that load instantly in a browser tab — and can still ship to Steam.
skip if — you need 3D, console releases, or tens of thousands of moving objects — a native engine like Godot or Unity fits better.
Godot + GDScript
A royalty-free engine for indie games headed to Steam, mobile, or consoles.
skip if — the game must run well in a browser tab, or the team is already deep in Unity's asset ecosystem — Godot's web export has limits and its asset marketplace is smaller.