A modern web app has 40+ moving parts: framework, database, auth, payments, analytics, observability, deployment. Picking well at each layer compounds. Picking poorly compounds the other way.
These guides cover the stack decisions WOWHOW has actually made in production — what we chose, why, what we regretted, and what we would pick again. If a recommendation is not here, it is because we have not shipped on it long enough to defend it.
In 48 hours, Google lost the co-author of the Transformer architecture to OpenAI and the creator of AlphaFold to Anthropic. Alphabet's market cap dropped $250 billion. This is not routine talent churn.
For the first time since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, OpenAI holds less than half the AI assistant market at 46.4%. Gemini is at 27.7%, Claude at 10.3% with a 13% paid conversion rate that leads the field. The single-platform era of AI development is over.
One HTTP POST. No credentials required. 85% success rate against Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex simultaneously. Tenet Security disclosed agentjacking on June 12 — prompt injection at the observability layer — and the exposure math is ugly.
