Building Your First Simple Stack

You don't build a stack all at once. You build one connection, use it for a few weeks, then add the next piece once you've noticed where the next bottleneck is.

Start by mapping what you already have. List every AI tool you currently use and what each one does. Most people find they already have two or three pieces of a stack without realizing it, they've just never been connected.

Find the one manual handoff that annoys you most. The moment where you copy something out of one tool and paste it into another is exactly where a stack should connect. That's your first integration point, not a new tool, just a connection between two you already have.

Add one new piece only when there's a clear gap. If mapping your tools shows nothing handles images, and you need images weekly, that's when a specialized tool from Level 3 earns its place, not before.

Write down your stack once it's running. Two or three sentences: what tool handles what, in what order. This is the same habit as saving a good prompt back in Level 2, it turns something you built once into something you can explain, maintain, and hand off if you ever need to.

Revisit it monthly, not daily. A stack that changes every day isn't a system, it's chaos. Check in once a month: is anything broken, is anything now redundant, is there one new bottleneck worth solving. That's the whole maintenance loop.