The stack we build with.
Tools are not the work. The work is closing the gap between your ad click and your closed deal. The toolbox is the leverage that lets one operator do it for SMB prices, on your existing stack, in eight weeks. This page is the working list.
What's new — May 2026
Nine additions in one pass, grouped by where they sit in the stack. The detail is in the relevant section further down — these are the headlines.
Higgsfield Soul Cinema, unlimited tier. Upgraded from Plus on 20 May. Soul Cinema is now the default model for character-scene work — composite multi-character scenes that were impossible at the Plus tier are now routine. Nano Banana Pro retired for character work (magazine-spread bias).
OpenAI API — registered as the second-opinion frontier. Tier 1, GPT-5.5 and the o-series. Sits inside the taste-to-skill pipeline as the dual-frontier debias against Anthropic Opus. We are an Anthropic-first stack; the OpenAI key earns its place by catching what one model alone misses.
Sintra.ai — logged as a landmark, not a tool we use. Every SMB buyer in the next eighteen months will mention it. We needed a thirty-second answer that explains why MEP is a different shape. The full review is on the record — one out of nine on the internal Hype Radar; consumer-tier, credit-capped, no MCPs, no workflows, no agents. The commercial-affiliate angle is a separate question filed in proposals.
Tailscale mesh, wired 24 May. Solves a binding constraint that has lived in our hard-rules file for weeks — the agent sandbox could not reach the always-on Mac mini at its LAN address. Every mini deploy was a paste-block out to the operator's laptop. Tailscale gives every node a stable mesh name. The sandbox now SSHes the mini and runs the deploy itself. Reusable, ephemeral, tagged. Dead sandboxes evaporate.
Backblaze B2, off-mini backup. Single bucket, region-pinned, application key scoped read-and-write to one bucket only — blast radius bounded. rclone mirrors the curated archive and the docker configs from the mini. Roughly fifty-four cents a month over the free tier for a hundred gigabytes. The mini is no longer the single point of failure for anything we wouldn't want to redo from scratch.
X / Twitter API, pay-per-use. Half a cent per read, one cent per post, no monthly minimum. Account is @anthony71booth. Two Workers: articulate-x-publish live since 24 May, OAuth 1.0a signed, 280-character validated, bearer-token gated; articulate-x-read queued as the panel-of-experts inflow side. The Worker holds the signing key once so every other script just POSTs JSON.
post-to-x skill — the brand-voice gate in front of the Worker. The Worker accepts any bearer-authed JSON. The skill is the only thing that runs the draft through the de-Claudification rules first. Never POST direct to the Worker from an agent session — always through the skill. Stops the "Claude voice leaks onto the timeline" failure mode at source.
Cloudflare API token captured. Workers-compute family scope only — KV, R2, Pages, Scripts, Routes, Tail, Builds, Containers, Observability, plus account and user reads. No DNS-edit, no zone-write. Closes the placeholder that's been on the credentials page for two weeks. Worker deploys now run end-to-end from the sandbox.
film-still-composite skill — the discipline layer on top of Soul Cinema. Higgsfield's unlimited tier made composite multi-character scenes routine. This skill wraps every composite-scene brief with the prompt-anchor library prepend and the Roger-discipline lighting/framing/lens register, so the brief stays cinematographer-grade rather than Higgsfield-default. Belinda and Dylan are the standing approval gate.
post-to-x skill — see above. Listed twice because it earns its place in both buckets: a new distribution capability and a new discipline gate.
How we pick
Every tool earns its place on three tests.
- Does it do the job in one tool, or three? One beats three.
- Does it run on your stack after we hand over, or does it lock you into us? Hand-over beats lock-in.
- Is it the best in its category right now, or the most familiar? Best beats familiar.
Test three is the discipline most operators fail. Familiarity is comfortable. The category moves every quarter.
The stack — Applications, each grouping its Tools
Tools alone don't ship anything. Applications do — the assemblies of tools, models, and skills that produce a specific outcome for a client. This page reads top-down: each Application explains what it does and what's underneath it. The same tool can appear under more than one Application — that's a feature, not a duplication. A capable Anthropic key, for example, lives under Voice, MEP, and Build.
Marketing Engine Pilot
The productised offer. Five MEP recipes ship as Cloudflare Workers (HTTP-shaped) plus optional Hermes skills (conversation- and daemon-shaped) — the client owns both at week eight. No no-code platform between us and the client's stack. No lock-in beyond DNS, which is portable anyway.
Five MEP recipes — lead routing, CRM enrich, ad-spend monitor, form-to-Slack, invoice nudge — all ship as Workers, deployed via Wrangler to the client's own free Cloudflare account at handover.
Paired with Workers. Anything WhatsApp-shaped, memory-shaped, or self-learning lives here. Full page →
Opus / Sonnet / Haiku picked per task. Most MEP recipes use Haiku for triage, Sonnet for drafts, Opus only where reasoning is the work.
One key fans out to 100+ models. Used when a tenant needs a non-Anthropic provider for data-residency or cost-shape reasons.
Small relational state in D1, key-value in KV, files in R2. Region-pinnable for PDPL-strict clients.
One repo per engagement — articulate-mep-<client>. wrangler deploy moves the Workers to the client's account in 20–60 minutes at week 7.
Articulate Voice — "AI worth talking to"
A six-layer stack that turns any AI product, agent, or website into a channel-native voice surface. The Roche-Debbie pilot is the canonical build; BossCouple's WhatsApp agent is the second deployment. Each layer is configurable per tenant — channel, routing, voice-in, brain, context, voice-out.
Bot phone number with allowlisted users. Voice notes auto-transcribed; TTS replies sent as MP3 attachments. iMessage, Signal, Telegram all map to the same shape.
Transcribes `.opus` voice notes on the way in. Multilingual. Same Creator-plan API key as TTS.
Per-persona system prompt, per-deployment model dial. The mentor for Debbie sounds like Constance; the BossCouple agent sounds like the brand.
Per-tenant context loader. The bot reads what it needs to know about the user's life and work before it replies.
Brand-aligned voice ID per persona. Belinda gate before any voice ID locks. Dylan owns the prompt anchor library per brand.
Streaming voice agent with turn-detection + interruption. On trial as the alternative to self-stitching layers 3–6. Replaces the multi-tool path when low-latency conversation is the requirement.
The 24/7 substrate. Memory across sessions, self-learning skill library, Curator. Full page →
Hermes Agent
Open-source from Nous Research. MIT-licensed. Replaces n8n in the MEP automation pair. Where Claude Code is the interactive build surface, Hermes is the 24/7 daemon — WhatsApp pipeline, self-learning skill loop, Curator-managed library, persistent context per user. BossCouple is pilot #1. Full deploy spec, costs, training loop and risks on the standalone page.
Persistent background process with cron + event triggers. Same SKILL.md format as Anthropic / agentskills.io — skills are portable both directions.
$8.99/mo · 2 vCPU · 8 GB RAM · UAE-reachable PoP. $215.76 over 24 months upfront. The named substrate.
Default model layer for Hermes. One key, 100+ models. Per-call provider selection for cost-shaping or data-residency.
Dedicated bot number, allowlisted users, conversation history persisted. Strangers get silence. UAE prepaid SIM ~AED 50.
Auto-transcription path for inbound voice messages. Same Creator plan key.
Autonomous 7-day pass that grades, consolidates, archives agent-created skills. Snapshots before mutating; rollback is one command.
2,200 + 1,375 chars in every session prompt. Plus FTS5 SQLite search across every past conversation.
For clients who want "no third-party inference, full stop." Quality drops vs frontier; requires KVM 4 minimum for usable Llama 70B.
Distribution backbone
X went live as a first-class distribution surface on 24 May — the first of a Worker-plus-skill pattern that generalises to every social channel. The Worker holds the signing key; the skill holds the brand-voice rules. Nothing posts without both.
$0.005/read, $0.01/post. No monthly minimum. Account is @anthony71booth. App is articulate-radar-reader.
OAuth 1.0a signed. 280-char validated. Bearer-token gated. Returns the X response transparently for debugging.
Panel-of-experts inflow. Pulls quoted timelines, scrapes specific accounts, feeds the read-side of the content engine. Build trigger: first panel curated.
The only thing that runs drafts through de-Claudification before signing the bearer call. Stops "Claude voice on the timeline" at source.
Three-posts-a-week target. Worker shape queued for the same Worker-plus-skill pattern once volume justifies.
Carries gigreels.articulate-ai.work, famflix.articulate-ai.work, plex.articulate-ai.work. Internet-in routing without exposing the home gateway.
For one-pagers and microsites that don't need a Mac mini. Each engagement's case-study page sits here.
Content production
Tools are not the work. The brief is the work. These tools earn their place because they let one operator hold the brief from concept through to ship without losing register. Hard lines: never AI-generate a real property or a third-party brand mark. Real-named likenesses: photography preferred per engagement.
Upgraded from Plus on 20 May. Soul Cinema is the default for character-scene work. Composite multi-character scenes that were impossible at the Plus tier are now routine.
Custom Element training locks a house style once — every future image lands in the same visual register. Used for everything that isn't a real face, property, or brand-mark.
Where the type sits on the image. Brand-kit colours, multi-slide layouts, the carousels themselves.
British register, broadcast-quality. 100k chars/month covers a working content engine. Daniel + Charlie are the locked British voices.
The skill that fails LOUDLY if a brand has no anchor library. $10/day cost gate. Belinda + Dylan standing gate before anything ships.
Wraps Soul Cinema with the cinematography brief — lighting, framing, lens register — so composites stay Roger-grade rather than Higgsfield-default.
One brief → 10–50 candidates across Pinterest, Unsplash, Pexels, Pixabay, Adobe Stock. Live moodboard artifact. $0 baseline.
Auto-fires on chart-design or chart-critique. Loads Tufte's full canon — data-ink ratio, lie factor, small multiples. Every chart for an external surface runs the Tufte test first.
Build surface — agents, models, plumbing
Claude Code is the daily driver — files, commands, MCPs, persistent project context. Cowork is the same model family wearing a Word-doc-shaped hat. The MCP layer is the bridge from "the agent thinks" to "the agent acts on real systems."
Reads files, writes files, runs commands, calls connected services. Holds context across a project for as long as the project lives. Lived in daily.
Same model family, different shape. Better for the things that have to look right on a screen — offer one-pagers, audit reports, fit-call follow-ups, slide decks.
Opus for hard reasoning. Sonnet for the daily driver. Haiku for fast and cheap. We pick per task. The same model for everything is the wrong default.
GPT-5.5 + o-series. Used by the dual-frontier debias step in the taste-to-skill pipeline. We are Anthropic-first by conviction; the OpenAI key catches what one frontier alone misses.
Gmail, Drive, Calendar, Apple Notes, HubSpot, PayPal, Stripe, Square, Slack, Notion, Atlassian, M365, Box, Gong, Granola, Klaviyo, Figma, Canva, Adobe, Spotify, Chrome, Vercel, plus PDF + shell. Some installed, some on demand.
brand-voice, marketing, small-business, PDF tools, deploy, deliverables-scaffold, tufte-viz, ai-image, film-still-composite, post-to-x. A new skill is a one-file commit.
Recurring agent runs that fire while the agent is open. Interactive work; for always-on, see Hermes.
React 19, TypeScript, Tailwind v4, Geist. Single-file deploys for client landers. Full Next.js for routing or data. Client owns the repo.
Research surface
WebSearch alone returned verbal surface and missed the live page. The current pairing solves it — Firecrawl for deep fetch and JSON extraction; Claude in Chrome for login-walled or JavaScript-heavy pages; Granola for WhatsApp call capture; iMazing for historic-bulk WhatsApp extraction.
1,000 pages/month free. firecrawl_scrape single URL → clean markdown. firecrawl_search multi-source ranked results with optional inline scrape. Confirmed live 24 May.
1,000 requests/month free. Best for "find me thinkers semantically near X." Not installed yet; install trigger is the first brief where named-target Firecrawl isn't enough.
Built into Cowork. Cheapest "is X a known fact" surface. Not the right tool for live-page research — that's Firecrawl's job.
Browser agent. The 10% of the web that has no MCP — government portals, broker dashboards, anything client-rendered.
Baileys-based local bridge. SQLite DB never leaves the Mac. MCP tools surfaced to Claude: list_messages, get_chat, send_message, list_contacts, download_media.
System-audio capture of WhatsApp calls on Mac. Native transcription. Lands at Clients/<client>/calls/ auto-routed by the Haiku classifier.
One-shot per client. Reads iPhone backup, exports full WhatsApp DB to CSV (~$45 one-time licence). BossCouple Resurrect is the open job.
Operator infrastructure
Articulate runs on infrastructure Anthony owns end-to-end, not on a fragile chain of someone else's SaaS. One always-on Mac mini, one mesh VPN, one off-host backup, one push channel to the phone in his pocket. Everything else is a SaaS that earns its place by passing the three tests at the top.
Review-stage builds, password-gated client deliverables, scheduled jobs that don't need a cloud bill. Caddy + cloudflared + OrbStack + launchd jobs.
Wired 24 May. Mini at cowork-mini.tailf7afc5.ts.net. Sandbox joins ephemeral per session, SSHes the mini for deploys, evaporates when the session dies.
Single bucket, region-pinned, bucket-scoped key. rclone mirrors curated-flac + docker-configs from mini. ~$0.54/mo over the free tier for 100 GB.
Registrar, DNS, Universal SSL, CDN, Tunnel, Workers, Pages. API token captured 24 May — Workers-compute scope only, no DNS-edit, no zone-write.
One-way push channel coworkmini-x7q9p3aw2t. Free, public-channel obscurity-only. Used by mini-resident monitors and Hermes for alerts.
Hosts the *arr stack (Plex, Radarr, Sonarr, Lidarr, Prowlarr, Transmission) for MediaServer. Light-touch alternative to Docker Desktop.
Static file server with bcrypt basic_auth. Hosts the GIG case-study site at port 8000, behind the Cloudflare Tunnel.
Named tunnels from the mini to Cloudflare edge. No port-forwarding through the Etisalat home gateway. Every public-facing surface routes here.
Owns every always-on service on the mini — Caddy, cloudflared, transmission-daemon, wifi monitor, throughput agent, Tailscale.
Listed here as the landmark every SMB buyer mentions. One out of nine on the internal Hype Radar. The full review is on the record — credit-capped, no MCPs, no workflows, no agents.
What we deliberately don't use
No-code platforms as the system. Zapier, Make. Fine for a small bridge — wrong as the foundation. Locks you into a subscription and a builder shortage. We write code you own. n8n was on this page until 23 May as a visual-editor exception — retired entirely after Hermes replaced it as the conversational + daemon substrate. Workers + Hermes cover both columns.
Single-vendor marketing suites as the brain. HubSpot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the rest. We integrate with them. We do not ride them.
AI image generation as a headline tool. Useful occasionally. Never the proposition.
AI video as the deliverable. Different offer, different business. This one is the marketing engine.
Consumer-tier AI Helpers (Sintra, etc.) as the productisation answer. Real tools for solopreneurs; structurally shallow for the MEP shape. Credit caps, no MCPs, no workflows, no agents. They're a landmark on the page, not a tool in the stack.
Our policy on regularly finding what's best
The category moves fast. We move with it. Here is the schedule that holds us to it.
You don't need to know what any of this is. You need to know the system we install in your business runs on tools your team can keep using after the eight weeks. Nothing is locked to me. Nothing is on a subscription only I can pay for. Nothing breaks if I disappear.