~/connor.meador

~$ cat uses.md

Uses

My actual setup as of mid-2026 — the editor, the AI tooling, the MCPs, the deploy stack, and the operational scaffolding. Updated when something meaningfully changes.

Editor & AI

  • Claude Code

    Primary IDE for client work and the factory. Custom hooks, scoped settings per project, and a multi-mode dispatcher that picks the right model for the task.

  • Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context)

    Long-context refactors, codebase-wide audits, and the heavy reasoning on architecture decisions. The 1M context is genuinely load-bearing — it lets me hold an entire site’s source in head.

  • Claude Sonnet 4.6

    Day-to-day implementation tasks. Lower cost, plenty of capability for most React / Next.js / TypeScript editing.

  • OpenAI gpt-4o-mini

    Production chat endpoints in client apps. Cheap, fast, good enough at well-scoped RAG-grounded tasks.

MCPs (Model Context Protocol)

  • Firecrawl

    Site mapping, content scraping, and pre-build research. Indispensable when starting a new client engagement.

  • Playwright / chrome-devtools

    Headless QA, accessibility tree inspection, Lighthouse audits, screenshot diffs across viewports.

  • Sharp Image

    Per-project image pipelines — AVIF/WebP conversion, background removal, dimension extraction.

  • GitHub

    PR review automation, commit-message generation, cross-repo issue search. The factory’s default for VCS work.

  • Vercel + Vercel CLI

    Deploy + inspect + log retrieval. Production deploys happen via `pnpm release` which chains `vercel --prod && pnpm verify-canonical`.

Stack

  • Next.js 16 (App Router)

    Default framework. App Router, Server Components, Tailwind 4 with the CSS-first @theme block, strict TypeScript with noUncheckedIndexedAccess where the codebase tolerates it.

  • React 19

    Server Components by default, "use client" only for the interactive pieces.

  • TypeScript 5 (strict)

    Strict mode everywhere. Zod for runtime validation at every boundary.

  • Tailwind CSS 4

    CSS-first config in globals.css via the @theme block. No JS-side config files for tokens.

  • Vercel

    Hosting + edge functions + analytics + speed insights. Orphan-branch lock pattern for manual production promotion. Domain-level Cloudflare in front for a couple of the client sites.

Backend & infra

  • Supabase

    Auth + Postgres for client apps that need real auth/RBAC (My Place Lounge member portal).

  • Stripe

    Payments and member subscriptions when the app needs them.

  • Sanity

    Headless CMS for the small number of client sites where the owner edits content.

  • Resend

    Transactional email — lead notifications, chat transcripts, automatic intake confirmations.

  • Web3Forms

    Simple contact-form backend on marketing sites that don’t need a full transactional-email stack.

Automation & observability

  • n8n

    Cross-project orchestration — scheduled jobs, webhooks, content pipelines. Hosted self-managed.

  • IndexNow

    Auto-ping Bing / Yandex / Naver / Seznam on every `pnpm release`. Bing’s index also powers Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT search.

  • Lighthouse + axe

    Pre-merge perf + a11y gates. Targets: mobile Perf 95+, A11y 100, SEO 100.

  • Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster

    Indexing health, URL inspection, structured-data validation per project.

Hardware

  • MacBook Pro M5

    Daytime + travel machine. Runs the dev server, Claude Code sessions, and most of the client work.

  • Custom desktop: Ryzen 9 9950X + 96GB DDR5 + RTX 5070 Ti

    Heavy parallel work — concurrent agents, image pipelines, occasional local model inference. Picks up the night-shift overflow when the laptop is asleep.