ORM: Prisma

I use Prisma to interact with Postgres. There are other good options. Drizzle is solid. I mostly ended up on Prisma by chance and stuck with it because it does what I need. Data modeling is straightforward. Migrations are manageable. Prisma Studio is genuinely useful for inspecting and editing data. Could I switch? Sure. Do I feel the need to? Not really.

Deployment: Vercel (frontend) and Render (backend)

If I'm using Next.js, I usually deploy on Vercel. They build Next.js. The integration is smooth. Push to main, it builds, it deploys. That's it. I came from the FTP and cPanel era. FileZilla uploads. No version control. No safety net. Waiting forever for uploads and hoping nothing broke. Compared to that, modern deployment feels almost suspiciously easy. For backend services and APIs, I use Render. It gives me the same simplicity for backend deployments without managing a server myself. It beats maintaining a DigitalOcean droplet by a wide margin.

Testing and automation (when I actually do it)

I'm not going to pretend I write exhaustive tests for everything. When I do write tests, I use Jest. For automation, linting, testing, builds before deploy, I rely on GitHub Actions. Nothing fancy. Just enough to catch obvious breakage.

AI assistance: Claude Code (carefully)

Right now, I'm using Claude Code inside VS Code. I tried Cursor. It's good. Claude Code fits my workflow better. I don't vibe code large apps anymore. I tried. It backfired. What works better is heavy context: project rules, architecture notes, coding style docs. I write code manually, test manually, and then use the AI as a reviewer. Redundancy. Bugs. Missed patterns. That's where it helps. Letting an agent run wild on a large codebase? I've learned that lesson already.

Real projects using this stack

Two production projects currently run on this setup.

webutils.io started as a place to collect all the small tools I kept bouncing between sites for: PDF tools, file compression, favicon generation, fake data, and so on. Most tools run client side, so they're fast. There are also dev focused utilities like diffing, grid and flexbox generators, gitignore creation, TypeScript interface generators, etc. It's free. No registration required unless you want favorites. Auth is handled with NextAuth. There's an admin area for managing users, tools, and analytics. AI was used, but not blindly. A lot of manual review and cleanup.

devsheets.io is a cheat sheet platform. The goal wasn't to dump documentation. It was to capture what I actually want to remember: the useful parts, with quick references and realistic examples. There are sheets for Git, TypeScript, Python, Express, DOM manipulation, even AI prompting. More are coming, across different languages. There's also a health related SaaS in progress using the same stack. It's a symptom tracker with analytics and AI generated correlations. I'm deliberately careful there. No diagnoses. No medical claims. Just patterns and suggestions. There will likely be a paid tier, but it's not close to finished.

That project started as pure vibe coding. It collapsed under its own weight. Fixing one thing broke three others. That failure was useful.

When Next.js isn't the right tool

Sometimes Next.js is the wrong choice. I built a fake REST API service similar to JSONPlaceholder at apiocker.com It's an Express app. The frontend is just a static HTML file in a public folder. The API is the product.

Same with apiprobe.dev, an open source HTTP client tool. Think Postman lite. Both are open source. If you want to contribute, feel free. Not everything needs a meta framework.