Article archive
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OrbStack: Docker on Mac Without the Docker Desktop Tax
Docker Desktop wants $11/month for a business license. OrbStack does the same thing, faster, with less RAM, and it’s free for personal use. If you’re running…
Cloudflare Tunnel: The Free Tool That Killed My Hosting Bill
I spent three months paying for VPS hosting before discovering that Cloudflare will connect any machine to the internet for free. No public IP required. No…
Your Mac Mini Is a Better Server Than Any VPS You Can Afford
I just replaced three hosting providers with a Mac Mini sitting on my desk.Not as a dev server. Not for testing. As the actual production server, serving a…
The Trust Problem: How to Win Clients When You're an Army of One
A prospect evaluates your proposal. The work is exactly what they need, the price is right, and the timeline is better than anyone else's. Then they ask how…
Picking Your Battleground: How to Find Industries Ripe for One-Person Disruption
Solo builders with AI can operate at extraordinary scale. But not every market rewards that. Some industries are structured in ways that make a one-person…
The Knowledge Flywheel: Why Solo Builders Get Smarter While Teams Get Bigger
When a ten-person team hits a scaling problem, the most common response is to hire person number eleven. When a solo builder hits the same problem, they have…
When AI Gets It Wrong (And Why That's Not the Problem You Think)
Everyone has an AI horror story. The chatbot that fabricated a legal citation. The summary that reversed the meaning of the original document. The confidently…
The First 48 Hours: From Zero to Your First AI Workflow
The gap between "I should use AI more" and actually having a system that works without you is where most solo builders stall. They read about 10x productivity.…
AnythingLLM: One App for Documents, Chat, and RAG
Retrieval-augmented generation sounds straightforward when you describe it. Give an AI access to your documents so it can answer questions about them. In…
n8n: Building AI Workflows Without Writing Code
This site has spent several articles talking about workflows, triggers, and systems that run without being asked. At some point, the question becomes…
Open WebUI: Giving Local AI a Real Interface
Running a model locally is the first step. Using it productively every day is a different problem. The command line works for testing. It doesn't work for the…
Meta's Llama: The Open-Source Model That Changed the Economics
When Meta released the first Llama models, the immediate reaction was surprise. A trillion-dollar company was giving away the kind of technology that others…
Ollama: The Case for Running AI on Your Own Machine
The assumption that AI requires an API key and a monthly bill is so widespread that most builders never question it. You sign up for a service, feed it tokens,…
Dispatches from Month Zero
This is the first building-in-public update for The Solo Stack. I plan to do these regularly — honest snapshots of what's happening, what's working, and what…
The Real Cost of Running on AI in 2026
Everyone talks about AI making things cheaper. Almost nobody shares actual numbers. So let's fix that. I'm going to break down what AI actually costs to run…