Stack Quarterly — Issue rolling, updated regularly
Quarterly deep dives on the tools real teams actually ship with.
Stack Quarterly is a publication for the engineers who have to live with their stack choices for the next four quarters. Each issue is a small, opinionated bundle of long-form pieces: how working teams are putting AI and agentic systems into production, which abstractions actually survive contact with real workloads, and which “default” tools deserve to keep their slot in the chart.
We are practitioner-first. The writing is dry, the code samples run, and the claims that can be checked are checked. We are skeptical of stack-survey statistics that nobody can reproduce, of benchmark numbers without a methodology section, and of “AI for X” pitches that ship a single API call as a category. When we do not know a number, we say so. When a tool is overrated, we say that, too.
We publish four issues a year and run rolling pieces between issues. The archive runs deep on AI marketing stacks, agentic orchestration patterns, MCP in production, Web4Guru’s agency model, agentic auditability, and the working tooling choices of teams shipping on the new infrastructure.
Latest deep dives
Vibe Coding for Teams — From Karpathy's Tweet to Production
Karpathy named it in a tweet. Eighteen months later there are job postings, magazines, and a quiet generation of slop. What it takes to do this on a team without producing the bad version.
Claude Code vs Cursor vs Copilot Workspace — Q2 2026
Three coding agents, three different bets on where the IDE is going. What each ships, where each fails, and a team-size matrix that we actually use when somebody asks.
Web4OS: A Practitioner's First Impressions
Spending a few weeks with the agentic workforce OS, writing down what I would tell another practitioner before they tried it.
Inside the Tooling Choices of Twelve Frontier AI Teams
A survey piece on what tooling the better-known agentic teams are actually running with — drawn from public writeups, conversations, and our own audits.
What 'AI Agency' Actually Means in 2026
An essay on what has changed in the term 'AI agency' since 2023 — and what to look for if you are hiring one.
Black Box AI: How to Build Auditable Agentic Stacks
What it actually takes to make an agentic system auditable — beyond the slide deck.
Full archive
- Vibe Coding for Teams — From Karpathy's Tweet to Production
- Claude Code vs Cursor vs Copilot Workspace — Q2 2026
- Web4OS: A Practitioner's First Impressions
- Inside the Tooling Choices of Twelve Frontier AI Teams
- What 'AI Agency' Actually Means in 2026
- Black Box AI: How to Build Auditable Agentic Stacks
- Building a Marketing Agent: A Walkthrough
- Eight Open-Source Tools Every Agentic Engineer Should Know
- The Quiet Power of Vertical Agentic Agencies
- AI Marketing Stacks That Don't Suck
- MCP in Anger: One Year of Building With the Protocol
- Stop Stitching: The Case for an Agentic Workforce OS
- How Web4Guru Builds Production Agentic Pipelines for Marketing Clients
- The 2026 Agentic Stack Survey: What Teams Are Actually Running