Too Many Tools: A Tech Stack Picker That Generates Diagrams and AI Prompts

The modern tech stack is absurd: front end, back end, file storage, auth, database, analytics, product analytics, alerting, emails, payments, CMS, CI/CD — and that's before you pick specific tools for each layer. @arjay_mccandless built a site where you pick your stack visually, then either download the diagram or copy a prompt that explains the entire stack to Claude or ChatGPT.

The Problem

Every new project starts with the same overwhelming question: which combination of tools do I need? The layers multiply:

Layer	Examples
Front end	React, Next.js, Svelte, Vue
Back end	Node, Python, Go, Rails
Database	Postgres, Supabase, PlanetScale, MongoDB
Auth	Clerk, Auth0, Supabase Auth, NextAuth
File storage	S3, Cloudflare R2, Supabase Storage
Payments	Stripe, Paddle, LemonSqueezy
Analytics	PostHog, Mixpanel, Amplitude
Alerting	PagerDuty, Datadog, Sentry
Email	Resend, Postmark, SendGrid
CMS	Sanity, Contentful, Payload
CI/CD	GitHub Actions, Vercel, Railway

Picking one from each category is step one. Understanding how they connect is step two. Most developers figure this out through trial, error, and Stack Overflow threads.

The Solution — Visual Stack Picker

The site lets you:

Select tools from each layer of the stack
See the diagram — how the tools connect to each other
Download the diagram — for docs, PRDs, or architecture discussions
Copy a prompt — paste into Claude or ChatGPT to get a full explanation of how the stack works together

The prompt export is the clever part. Instead of reading docs for 12 different tools, you get an AI-generated walkthrough of your specific combination — how auth flows through the backend, how the database connects to the API, how payments trigger webhooks.

Why This Is Useful

Three audiences benefit differently:

Solo founders / indie hackers — pick a stack without analysis paralysis, get an instant architecture explanation
Junior developers — understand how the pieces fit together before writing code
Teams onboarding new engineers — "here's our stack diagram and the AI-generated explainer"

The diagram alone saves the first 30 minutes of every architecture discussion where someone draws boxes on a whiteboard.

Key Takeaways

The modern tech stack requires picking from 12+ categories of tools — it's overwhelming
This site lets you pick tools visually, then download a diagram or copy an AI prompt explaining the stack
The AI prompt is the real unlock: paste into Claude/ChatGPT and get a complete walkthrough of how your specific tools connect
Useful for solo founders, junior devs, and team onboarding

Resources

TechStackPicker — The tool referenced in the video
Claude — Use with the generated prompt for stack explanations