chuck-stack Tools

The purpose of this page is to help you understand what tools we choose to include in the chuck-stack and why we chose them. The chuck-stack has been cultivated over the last 25 years. Much effort, testing and production use has gone into this list of tools and its selection criteria.

Selection Criteria Summary

When choosing our stack tools, we:

Focus on commonly used and well understood tools to make AI augmentation easier. The better AI understands a tool, the more AI can do the work for you.
Choose tools that build on one another: Incus => Linux => PostgreSQL => PostgREST => Nushell => AIChat => Zellij...
Select tools that allow unlimited usage and scale massively.

Selection Criteria Details

Here are the more detailed guidelines for inclusion:

Commonly used - and well understood to make AI augmentation easier.
Open source - or at least as open as possible.
Start simple - easy to understand and reason about. Nix pushes this concept a little (or a lot); however, the power and simplicity it creates is worth the extra effort.
Basic functionality - supports basics like CRUD (create, read, update and delete) with minimal effort.
Kind educator - needs someone in the community who makes the technology kind to the target audience.
Kind integrator - needs someone local to you digitally to help you leverage the tool.
Synergy - supports other tools in the stack. Example: runs on or integrates with PostgreSQL.
Simple architecture - not overly complicated relative to the tool's purpose.
Enterprise scalability - it needs to scale to support an organization of at least 1,000+ across multiple continents.
Enterprise testing and deployment - it needs to support team development where improvements can be development, tested and accepted in dedicated environments and easily migrated to production using CI/CD concepts or scripts.
Deployment safety and simplicity - needs to create safe applications that deploy with minimal dependencies.
Safe, reliable and performant - if a system is not safe, reliability does not matter. If it is not reliable, performance does not matter.
Command Line Interface (CLI) centric - we love cli interfaces because they are accessible from anywhere.
REST centric - we love scriptable interfaces that can be called from anywhere (not just the cli).
Globally deployed - supports any organization in an corner of the world on almost any hosting platform.

Preference for Rust Language

You might observe that we have a preference for applications written in the Rust language. This preference is intentional for the following reasons:

Rust promotes writing safe applications by eliminating the majority of problems that have plagued developers for the last 30 years.
Rust applications typically compile down to a single binary.
The Rust tool chain is simple to understand and execute for both application development and deployment.
Rust applications tend to perform better and faster than their counterparts.
Rust supports full stack development thus minimizing the number of experts needed to solve a problem.
The Rust community practices and values align with the chuck-stack community. See our code of conduct as an example.

Critical Path Tools

The following tools are in the chuck-stack critical path to success. They solve a core need in the chuck-stack, and they create synergy with each other.

Incus (virtualization) - container and virtual machine (VM) tool to develop, test and deploy IT applications.
Linux (compute) - best tool to run applications on just about any platform in the world.
PostgreSQL (data) - best tool for managing "data" database with best performance and enterprise features.
PostgREST (API) - PostgreSQL tool for exposing an OpenAPI compliant REST interface directly out of your database.
aichat (AI) - command line AI chat and execution tool that include saves sessions, rag, function-calling and more.
Nushell (system and data) - Terminal shell with designed to understand and manipulate structured data.
Zellij (UI) - terminal workspace environment for managing information and transactions.
Git (code, information, collaboration) - best tool for managing information, instructions and discussions. It provides most options for AI amplification.
Obsidian (knowledge) - best tool to authoring text.

Other Tools

Other tools play a supporting role in the chuck-stack and an organization's success.