417: The Best Tech Stack in the Age of AI

Hey. It's Arvid, and this is the Bootstrap founder. A couple of years ago, I tweeted that the best tech stack is the one you already know. And to this day this is one of my most resonating tweets. People keep bringing it back and founders who've been around for a while seem to particularly agree with it. They've gone through the whole learning experience of trying new tech stacks only to find that investing a lot of time in a new technology often is not worth doing that effort. Like, what they wanted to do was actually trying to build a business quickly. So a quick word from our sponsor here, paddle.com, because they're a great example of a smart tech choice that massively speeds up and stabilizes your early days of building a business. I've been using Paddle as my merchant of record, my payment provider for all my software businesses because they take care of taxes, currencies, track client transactions, update credit cards in the background so I can focus on dealing with my competitors and actually building the business and not having to deal with banks and financial regulators. So if you would rather just build your product, check out paddle.com as your merchant of record and payment provider. Now recently, a peer of mine asked a very interesting question that adds a layer to this idea of the best tech stack being the one you already know. They suggested that at this point, the best tech stack is probably the one that the AI tool that you use for coding knows the most about. And I think that's a fascinating thought. And I think it's kind of partially true or true ish because for many people who don't do their own coding anymore, the best tech stack might not just be the one that they know best or know best from the past, but the one that the coding AI handles pretty well. It does make sense. Right? You use a tool, might as well use what the tool thinks it's best. But here's what I believe. While the original statement still holds true, the best tech stack is the one you already know. We have to think about it in its inverted form. It doesn't matter if the AI model knows a coding language or framework the best. The quality of code AI produces and the quality of code that ultimately ends up in your software product is still directly connected to our capacity of understanding and judging, reviewing, and debugging that particular code. We still need to choose what we know best. Let me explain why. To make sense of this, it's really helpful to understand just how these AI models are being built. An AI model is effectively a token guesser that builds upon existing examples of the written word. Human written word or computer written word doesn't really matter. It has ingested hundreds of millions of documents, code bases, Stack Overflow …