The 6-Tool Dev Stack That Acts as Your Whole Engineering Team

Ever feel like you spend more time managing your project than actually building it? Between planning, reviewing code, testing, and deploying, the "meta-work" can eat up your best hours. What if you could automate those roles and get back to the core of coding?

That's the idea behind Garry Tan's gstack. It's not a single tool, but a curated, opinionated set of six that work together. The goal is ambitious: to have this setup act as your CEO, Engineering Manager, Release Manager, and QA Engineer. It's a complete system for shipping software with less overhead.

What It Does

gstack is a blueprint for a modern, AI-augmented development workflow. It connects several powerful tools into a cohesive pipeline that guides a project from initial idea to deployed code. The stack handles planning, code generation, review, testing, and deployment, aiming to automate the non-creative parts of development.

Why It's Cool

The clever part isn't any single tool, but the specific combination and the philosophy behind it. This stack assigns a real-world role to each piece of technology, creating a full "team" structure around your solo project.

1. CEO (Claude Code): This is the strategic planner. You give it the high-level product vision and it helps break it down into actionable engineering tasks.
2. Engineering Manager (Cursor): This is your AI-powered IDE. It takes the tasks from the "CEO" and helps you implement them efficiently, right in your editor.
3. Release Manager (Warp Terminal + GitHub CLI): Warp provides a modern terminal experience, and GitHub CLI (gh) automates your entire workflow—creating issues, PRs, and managing releases—without leaving the command line.
4. QA Engineer (Replicate + BrowserStack): This is the testing duo. You can use AI models via Replicate to generate test data or scenarios, and BrowserStack gives you a massive matrix of real devices and browsers to ensure your code works everywhere.

It turns abstract development concepts into a concrete, role-based workflow. You're not just using an AI assistant; you're "briefing your CEO" and then "tasking your engineering manager."

How to Try It

You won't find a single installer for gstack. It's a reference architecture. Here's how to get started:

1. Head over to the gstack repository. Read the README to understand the philosophy and the specific tool choices.
2. Explore the tools individually. You likely use some already (like GitHub CLI). The key is integrating them intentionally.
3. Start with one role. For example, if you're already using Cursor, consciously use it as your "Engineering Manager" for your next task. Pair it with gh (your "Release Manager") to create a well-documented PR from the command line.
4. Adopt the mindset, not just the tools. Think about which part of your process is "management" vs. "creation," and see if one of these tools can automate the former.

Final Thoughts

You might not need or agree with every tool in this specific stack, and that's okay. The real value of gstack is the framework it provides. It encourages you to think critically about your own workflow and deliberately choose tools that handle the administrative grind.

For solo developers or small teams, this kind of systematic automation can be a game-changer. It lets you focus your human creativity on the hard, interesting problems while the "team" of tools handles the predictable parts. It's less about having an AI write all your code and more about having a system that lets you operate at a higher level.

Follow us for more interesting projects: @githubprojects