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. Either the tools is just easy to understand, or the chuck-stack can make it easy by example and/or explanation. 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.
Hosting option - solution offers a reasonable hosting option to help you get started (examples: netbird, discourse).
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.

Language Preference

You might observe that we have a preference for applications written in the modern languages like Rust and Zig that a) compile directly to native binaries, b) run in a deterministic manner (example: no garbage collection), and c) create a tool chain that is both easy to use, script and reason about.

This preference is intentional for the following reasons:

Rust and Zig promote writing more safe applications by eliminating many of mistakes that have plagued developers for the last 30 years.
These applications typically compile down to a single binary.
These tool chains are simple to understand and execute for both application development and deployment.
These applications tend to perform better and faster than their counterparts.
These tool chains support full stack development thus minimizing the number of experts needed to solve a problem.
These community's practices and values align with the chuck-stack community. See our code of conduct as an example.

Critical Path Tools

The sub-pages that follow identify critical path tools that create synergy with each other. These tools include Incus (virtualization), Linux (compute), PostgreSQL (data), PostgREST (API), aichat (AI), Nushell (system and data), and more...

Other Tools

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