Set the stack up right, first.
Three tracks, one method.
Web
Sites and web apps, from a landing page to a multi-tenant product.
- SEO-driven
- SaaS
- Tool
Mobile
iOS and Android apps that share one codebase an agent can hold in its head.
- Consumer
- Companion
- Tool
Backend
APIs, data pipelines and internal services with a contract an agent can verify.
- Product API
- Data & AI
- Internal
Complexity, not cost.
- 01
MVP · Ship it
One person, first users, nothing proven yet. Fewest moving parts, free tiers, one deploy command.
- 02
Growth · Charge for it
Paying users and a small team. Managed services, real auth and billing, observability you actually read.
- 03
Scale · Run it for many
Many teams, many regions, or compliance. Explicit service boundaries, typed contracts, and boring infrastructure.
Nine rules that hold across every track.
- 01
Choose boring, popular technology
Agents are best at what they have read most. Pick frameworks with years of docs, tutorials and open-source usage.
- 02
Types at every boundary, schema first
TypeScript strict, Pydantic or Go. One schema generates the migration, the validation and the client types.
- 03
Keep a feature in one folder
Vertical slices over layers. Everything a change needs should sit together, so the agent reads one place, not five.
- 04
Small files, unique names, full words
No ten index.ts files, no abbreviations, no clever one-liners. Name things after the domain, not the technique.
- 05
Write the conventions down, next to the code
AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md with commands, structure and decisions. Stale context is broken code.
- 06
Tests the agent runs before you do
A fast suite, runnable per file, against a real database. Tests are the specification an agent can check itself against.
- 07
Explicit over clever
Verbose, obvious code beats elegant code. If a construct needs human intuition to parse, the agent will guess.
- 08
Fewer moving parts
One repo, one package manager, one command to run everything. Managed services over self-hosted. Pinned versions.
- 09
Encode repeated workflows as skills
When you correct the agent the same way twice, write it down as a skill or rule it loads on demand.