What we recommend right now
The book deliberately never prints tool names, because this industry moves weekly and a book that bets on brand names ages into a liability. The names live here instead, updated as the landscape shifts.
Last updated: July 2026
The two rungs
The beginner route (your first win)
Lovable
Describe a thing in a sentence and it handles the plumbing: hosting, wiring, the parts the build chapter warns you about. Right for a first internal tool or the website your business has needed for two years.
It's a friendly wrapper around the serious models. Fine to start; you'll outgrow it the moment you want deeper control. And the demo is not the job, whoever builds it.
The serious build tool (where the real work happens)
Claude Code
The room where the tools in the book actually got built. It writes, it builds, it reaches into your other systems and acts. Harder at the start, hands down the best use of your time once you know what you're doing.
Use the business or API tier and turn training off before real business data goes through it.
The standard pieces, by the job they do
Somewhere to store data (database)
Supabase (Postgres underneath)
A proper database with the boring parts handled: backups, access rules, a clean doorway in. Row-level security is the setting that keeps customer A from ever seeing customer B.
Logins and accounts (authentication)
Clerk
Building your own login is the single most common place people leak data. Don't. Plug this in.
Taking payments
Stripe
You build the checkout or booking page that runs payments through it. You never rebuild the regulated machinery that moves and stores card details.
Sending email
Resend
You'd spend a week building email from scratch and it would land in spam.
Front end for public-facing things
Astro or Next.js (or plain Shopify for a shop)
Requirement-dependent, not fashion-dependent. A brochure site and a tool with logins want different pieces.
Automated testing
Vitest (units) + Playwright (clicks-through-the-screens)
Have the AI write and run tests that hammer the tool every time you change something. Then still click through it yourself.
Speech to text (the first win in the book)
Wispr Flow
Sits in the background, tidies the rambling as you talk, drops clean text wherever your cursor is. The built-in dictation tools mostly just transcribe you word for word.
· The names on this page will change, and that's the point of keeping it here rather than in print. The categories don't change.
· These are the ones we use, not commandments. Take the question, not the example.
· Whatever the tool: business or API tier, training turned off, before real customer, staff or supplier data goes through it.
· No affiliate links on this page. If that ever changes, it'll say so next to the link.
Trust the sequence, not the names