Toolkit

My toolkit.

What I build and write with.

Thinking and writing

• Claude

  The one I think with. Pair-programmer on Dart, editor on drafts, and the thing I argue with when a plan sounds better than it is.

  Anthropic ↗
• Claude Code

  Does the work over describing it -- writes and debugs in the repo. It debugged every hurdle across the seventeen days that built Braindex.

  In the terminal and VS Code ↗
• Notion

  Where everything lands before it has a home: app ideas, newsletter outlines, half-finished thoughts I would otherwise lose.

  Notion Labs ↗
• Granola

  Takes notes in meetings so I can listen in them, then gives me back the bit I needed.

  Meeting notes ↗

Building

• Flutter + Dart

  One codebase, iOS and Android. Every app I have shipped runs on it.

  Google ↗
• Firebase

  Auth, Firestore, Cloud Functions, analytics and security rules. The whole backend on every app, and the reason one person can ship one.

  Google ↗
• Lovable

  Used twice per project and no more: prototype the flow before opening the editor, then scaffold the marketing site’s first draft.

  AI app builder ↗
• Manus

  For the jobs that are research plus assembly instead of code, the ones where the output is a document, not a commit.

  Agentic AI ↗
• Gemini

  Content generation at volume. It wrote the 1,645-item question bank behind Braindex across twenty sections.

  Google ↗
• VS Code

  The editor everything else plugs into.

  Microsoft ↗
• three.js

  The 3D in M50 Speed Run, running inside a single HTML file with no build step.

  Open source ↗
• Capacitor

  Wraps a web build as a real iOS and Android app. How M50 ships to both stores from one file.

  Ionic ↗

Shipping and measuring

• Xcode

  iOS signing and provisioning. Necessary, and the source of the worst hour of most releases.

  Apple ↗
• Transporter

  Uploads the build to App Store Connect. More reliable than doing it from Xcode’s organiser.

  Apple ↗
• Vercel

  Serves this site and braindexapp.com. Push to main, it is live in under a minute.

  Hosting ↗
• Netlify

  The staging copy of this site, so nothing reaches davidcarr.me before I have looked at it.

  Hosting ↗
• GoDaddy

  Where the domains live. Unexciting, which is the correct amount of exciting for DNS.

  Domains and DNS ↗
• PostHog

  Funnels and retention, the questions Firebase’s dashboards are bad at answering.

  Product analytics ↗
• Firebase Analytics

  Events and daily actives inside the apps.

  Google ↗
• Vercel Analytics

  Traffic on this site. No cookie banner, which was the reason.

  Vercel ↗

The newsletter

• Resend

  Sends the newsletter. Clean API, and it does not try to also be a marketing suite.

  Email delivery ↗
• Decap CMS

  Lets me edit issues in a browser while the files stay as markdown in the repo. No database, no lock-in.

  Git-based CMS ↗
• GitHub Actions

  A cron job publishes Sunday’s issue and sends me Tuesday’s preview. The system runs whether I remember it or not.

  Automation ↗
• Wispr Flow

  I talk faster than I type and a lot of first drafts are just me thinking out loud. This turns that into text.

  Dictation ↗