Almost Timely News: 🗞️ What's My AI Tech Stack? (2025-02-09)

Step into my kitchen

Christopher S. Penn

Feb 09, 2025

Almost Timely News: 🗞️ What's My AI Tech Stack? (2025-02-09) :: View in Browser

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What's On My Mind: What's My AI Tech Stack?

More than a few folks have asked what my AI tech stack looks like personally, and it's an interesting question. One person asked for a peek behind the kimono, which is an expression I'd love to see get tossed on the bonfire because it displays profound cultural ignorance.

In Japanese culture, what's under a kimono is... a lot more clothes. There's a hadagi, which is more or less underwear, then a nagajuban, then the kimono, much in the same way you'd see someone's sweatshirt, then regular shirt, then undershirt.

Anyway. Let's talk tech stack.

Part 1: What is a Tech Stack, Anyway?

A tech stack is simply this: the toolbox of tools you use in your work. For AI, a tech stack is a bit misleading anyway - a stack implies some kind of order, from top to bottom. Things have a certain flow to them, and for me, that's not how I use AI. Instead, AI is more like a palette that a painter uses, or a kitchen counter loaded up with appliances.

If I'm making steak, there's no reason for me to fire up the blender for the steak. Blenders generally make terrible steak.

Okay, so what's in my AI kitchen?

First, I have three different types of AI enablement. The first are preparatory tools. These are tools I use to process stuff before using it with the main application.

The second are the processing tools. This is what most people think of when they think of the AI tech stack, tools like Gemini or ChatGPT. These tools take inputs, process them, and turn them into outputs.

The third are the post-processing tools. These are AI-enabled apps that perform functions beyond what a language model or an image model can do. Think of tools like Opus Clips or Matchering that take a finished product and repurpose it or put some polish on it.

And then there are all the distribution points, which have their own AI that I have no control over. Think YouTube's recommendation algorithm or LinkedIn's People You May Know.

There are two other things you should know about me, because they're relevant to how my AI kitchen is built. First, I'm kind of a cheapskate. I will generally prefer something free to something paid, especially when it comes to tech, because I know I can usually do as good a job as another tool. In the age of generative AI, this is doubly true.

Second, I'm kind of a tech libertarian. I believe in owning things. As much as I love the convenience of having any song available on your device or any movie you could want to watch streaming somewhere, I'm from a generation that still has ownership culture. I still have a binder of CDs in my basement. Because in a world where tech oligarchs decide what you can and can't have, I enjoy thumbing my nose at them and owning my software as much as possible.

The downside of this perspective is that what I have takes a lot more thought and maintenance. The upside is that I never have to worry that if my credit card stops working, so does every digital service I own. Those are my biases, and you should understand that my tech stack is built with that lens.

Part 2: Preparatory Tools

This is the bread and butter for me, and many of these tools are home-grown because I either couldn't find a tool that did what I wanted, or I could find it and couldn't figure out why I'd spend hundreds of dollars a month in subscription fees for a tool that I could make on my own.

What are they?

SQLite. This free, open source database platform is, for me, the best way to store data, especially AI-generated or AI-processed data. It's all local files, no server, no cloud, just data in a common format.
VSCodium with Cline: My favorite development environment. This is an open source version of Microsoft's VS Code, minus all of Microsoft's surveillance technologies. It's compatible with every VS Code extension.
Brave: This Chromium compatible browser has privacy baked into it at every turn. It's free, open source, runs all Chrome extensions, and blocks all kinds of tracking.
Thunderbird: This free, open-source email client stores all its messages in both SQLite tables and Unix MBOX formats. Believe it or not, this matters - if you want to process email at scale, this is the best way to do it. You download all your messages onto your machine in Thunderbird, and then just process the MBOX files locally. No API calls, no waiting, no internet needed once you have the messages downloaded.
NordVPN: This is my VPN that I use when I want to use a VPN to access stuff I'd rather not have people watching. I like that I can change endpoints quickly and easily.
Python: I don't love Python, but it's the lingua franca of the AI world. Every generative AI tool speaks Python, and speaks it well, so it's generally the best choice for coding if you want generative AI to do most of the lifting.
R and R Studio: This is my favorite. R is a data science and statistics programming language and is incredibly efficient, has great libraries, and thinks statistics natively.
Audio Hijack: This is the tool I use to record local audio on my Mac, regardless of application. I have this running any time I'm speaking on webinars and podcasts, because I like to have a local copy of what I say. For privacy's sake, I record just my end.
OBS Studio: When it's just me filming, this is the video recording tool I use. It's free, open source, powerful, it records locally (no cloud, so no uploading or downloading), and it can also stream.
Joplin: This is the note-keeping tool I live in. Free, open source, syncs across devices, and works in Markdown natively.
yt-dlp: A free, open source Python app that downloads YouTube videos, audio, and captions files.
Whisper.cpp: This is free, open source voice transcription software which I use with the Distil-Whisper model for accurate, high-speed, free, local transcription. This is great for any audio with one speaker or where you don't care if speakers aren't noted.
Aider Chat: This is free, open source command line pair programming. It's an incredible utility.
ffmpeg: Free, open-source video and audio converter that can convert just about anything to anything.
Pandoc: free, open-source document converter that can also convert almost anything to anything

You'll note, appropriately, that most of these tools are tools that generate data. I have a pile of custom tools I've built, a few of which include:

Article scraper: given a list of URLs, it uses Python and a few common Python libraries to scrape the articles, remove ads and navigation, and save the main text in text or Markdown formats.
Website converter: given a folder full of HTML, it uses Python and Markdown and converts all the web pages to plain text.
VTT processor: given a folder full of VTT captions files (the YouTube default format) this converts them to plain text that's way more readable.
Reddit grabber: given a subreddit and the number of days, this Python code grabs the posts and replies from the subreddit, using the Reddit API.

Part 3: Processing Tools

Now for the main event, the generative AI tools I use.

For local AI, there are two different servers I'll use.

LM Studio: When I need something fast, LM Studio (free, but not open source) can natively load MLX models (Mac native) which are 3-5% faster than models not optimized for the Mac.
Koboldcpp: For storytelling, fiction, and roleplay, this is the server I use because it's well designed for more creative model use.
SillyTavern: For roleplay (like virtual focus groups), there is no better tool. It requires either LM Studio, Koboldcpp, or API access to the AI of your choice.
AnythingLLM: The best all around interface for local AI usage.
Mistral Small 3: This is my day to day local AI model. It's fast, capable, and smart.
Deepseek R1 Distill Llama 70B: This is my heavy duty model when I need more knowledge and precision as well as some reasoning capabilities locally.
Qwen2.5 Coder: Still the best local model for writing code. Best used in a coding environment.
ComfyUI: free, open-source image generation that, with the right models, is incredibly powerful. Steep learning curve.
- Black Forest Labs Flux-1 Dev: hands down, one of the best image generation models around and it's free and open weights, so you can generate high quality images on your local machine if it's beefy enough.

For cloud AI, I have a bunch of different preferred choices.

NotebookLM: hands down the best retrieval augmented generation (RAG) tool there is when you need to minimize the risk of hallucination. Now powered by Gemini 2 Flash.
Google AI Studio: my preferred generative AI interface, because it gives administrative access to their models and you can do things like turn the safeties off.
- Gemini 2 Flash Thinking: Google's best reasoning model and quickly becoming my default. They did a really solid job with its reasoning.
- Gemini 2 Pro: their best standard model for tasks where you want to provide your own chain of thought.
Google Vertex AI: When you want to build inside Google Cloud, Vertex is the place to do it. Access to all of Google's cutting edge models, governed by your Google Cloud account's privacy and security.
IBM WatsonX: When you need the security of IBM with the flexibility of open weights models, WatsonX is the place to go.
Anthropic Claude: for precision coding and use cases where you need thorough instruction following, Claude is the best.
Deepseek R1: currently the chart topping open model, now available on multiple hosts around the world in privacy-friendly services
ChatGPT: my least favorite cloud service; compared to other providers, their models perform not as well (example: DALL-E is far less capable than Flux-1 on the same prompts, the new o3-mini is terrible quality compared to Deepseek, etc.), but their GPTs are nice for distributing ideas.

Part 4: Post-Processing Tools

Opus Clips: still the best long-to-short video splicing tool out there.
Fireflies.ai: A great transcription tool when you need to diarize (separate and denote) speakers in multi-speaker audio.
Matchering: an incredible Python library that, given reference audio, will level a target file with the same mastering as the reference audio. So useful for AI-generated songs that are mastered to sound like boring garbage.
Suno: Crazy good song generation software. I use it a lot for fun stuff. It ain't gonna win a Grammy any time soon.

And a couple of things I've made:

Google Speech Reader: given a text file, it chooses between Google Text to Speech (the default) or Eleven Labs and makes audio files out of text.
Video Visualizer: I didn't want to pay for Headliner any more so I wrote my own in Python. Takes in audio, spits out a cheesy visualization in video.
Email list cleaner: given a list of addresses that fail validation, this LLM-based tool tries to figure out if the user just fat fingered something (hello, all of you so-and-so@gmial.com, I see you) and repair it.

Part 5: A Cautionary Tale

As much as people love buffet lists like this of all the tools, this is like having a tour of Emeril's kitchen and seeing all the appliances. None of the ingredients are here. None of the recipes are here. None of the people who work in the kitchen are here. This is just the appliances list, and while that can be handy, the appliances don't add much value if you have no ingredients, no recipes, and no skills.

Second, this list changes like, weekly. As technology changes, I swap things in and out all the time. It will not be current for very long, but I hope it gives you a taste, more than anything, for how I think about the tools I use. I lean heavily towards things I can own, things I can control, things that work with as few dependencies on other companies as possible.

If the big AI tech companies went out of business tomorrow, what would I still have? I'd still have a huge suite of AI tools - Flux 1 for images, R1 for chat, Qwen for coding. I'd still have almost all the foundational tools I have now, and that's super important to me.

As the world becomes more and more uncertain, knowing that you have backups for things that are mission critical isn't just important, it's what helps you sleep at night.

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See you next week,

Christopher S. Penn