What's Changed in My Tech Stack (Hint: It's Claude)

Yesterday I went to send someone my solopreneur tech stack post that I wrote back in August. The very last tool outlined is ChatGPT, which got me thinking it was time for an update.

I do still use 95% of the tools in that piece. But there is one key difference: Claude is now at the foundation of so much of my work.

A few things before I get into this.

I think as a baseline, all of these companies have an evil side. The sheer amount of investment money being put into them means that the bottom line will always be shareholder value. ChatGPT just closed a $122 billion round, and those investors will want to see returns.

I know for companies at this scale, ethics rarely wins over shareholder value. I also believe this.

But right now, not using AI is a bit like saying you won't use the internet. I'm picking my poison with eyes wide open.

With all that said, in January I switched to Claude from ChatGPT as my primary tool of choice. I found Claude to be more of an editor than a rewriter, helping me see the gaps in my thinking rather than suddenly making everything sound like everyone else.

And when I watched Anthropic hold its line with the US Department of Defense earlier this year, I appreciated that they drew a line and kept it.

Ok, now probably what you're here for.

Three of the top ways I'm using AI in my day-to-day.

To-do list management

Every Monday morning I run a weekly review. Claude is connected to my Notion to-do list and both of my Google calendars (personal and business), so it pulls everything together in one place. It scans my task list, checks what client sessions are coming up, flags anyone I haven't been in touch with recently, and helps me figure out what actually needs to happen first.

The Monday review connects to a daily run that I do each morning. I set this up as a recurring skill so it runs the same way every week without me having to re-explain what I need.

It outlines my schedule for the day and lets me do things like time block for specific projects or push something to later in the week. 

I also use it as a running capture for anything that pops into my head, personal or professional. When something random comes up, I drop it in. The next morning it resurfaces in the daily review and I decide what to do with it then, rather than getting distracted by it whenever it pops into my head.

Importantly, I've trained it on the methodology I like: outline the one most important task for the week, two secondary tasks, and everything else grouped as additional. That structure means I'm not staring at a flat list of fifteen things trying to figure out where to start.

This used to eat 45 minutes of my Monday morning. Now it takes about ten. I still make the decisions, what to prioritize, what to push, but I'm not doing the gathering and cross-referencing manually anymore. 

Content planning

For content planning I use a Project in Claude, think of it as a dedicated workspace that holds memory and context for a specific topic.

My project is called "All Things Marketing" and inside it I have separate chats for Tuesday email, Thursday newsletter, and LinkedIn content calendar, among others.

The project knows who my ideal client is, what my content pillars are, and how I think about my work. I've shared my ICP, my content pillars, and past newsletters so it has real context rather than starting from scratch every time.

From there, I asked it to map out my LinkedIn content calendar each month with a mix of pillars, and then populate it directly into Notion. Now I open Notion, see the topic, and write the post myself. The thinking and the writing are still mine, Claude handles the organizing and the scaffolding.

This reduced the amount of time I spend mapping my content, and reduced the cognitive load of starting my thinking from scratch each time.

It's worth noting that because attention to detail is not a strength of mine (to put it lightly), I do have Claude proofread everything before it goes out. My husband appreciates not having to do this anymore.

Website building

I use Claude for website work in two different ways.

My business website is hosted through Kajabi, which has its own website builder. It works well, but it's limited when it comes to design. If I want something more visually interesting, I'll describe what I'm going for to Claude, it helps me design the layout, and then generates the custom code. I drop that into a custom code block in Kajabi and it's done.

The second way is for a personal side project. It's a pilot idea and I wanted to do it as free as possible. Rather than paying for a website builder, like Wix, Squarespace, or WordPress, I designed the whole site in Claude Chat. I then had it generate the HTML file, and then I uploaded that directly to Cloudflare to host it. Free, fast, and I didn't need to know how to code to make it happen.

A couple of things I'm paying attention to

It's genuinely hard to keep up with how quickly all of this is moving. And it's been useful, for work and for personal projects. But there are two things I keep coming back to.

The first is making sure I'm still doing the thinking. Claude is set up to push me to write things myself rather than just doing it for me. This is intentional.

There are moments when I just want something done, and having a tool that can do it in seconds makes that temptation real. But I don't want to lose the muscle. The thinking, the writing, the working through a problem, that's the work. I don't want to outsource that without noticing.

The second is pace. Getting things done more quickly just means most of us end up doing more. The accessibility of these tools makes it harder to justify taking a break, because there's always something else that could get done. And it's exciting and fills that dopamine gap. Sometimes it also makes me feel a little crazy. I have my eye on it.

I want to know how you are navigating it. Are you using these tools, and if so, what are you paying attention to?