You should publish your Stack

The benefits of having your own space on the Internet are well known. But once you have the website, what to put there? In this post, I argue for a specific and valuable use of your online home: your Stack, the list of things you use and why.¹

You can call it a “uses” page, a “setup” page, or “Stack”. Here is mine. An example section looks like this:

At the bottom of the post, I will link to a few more examples I like. Here are a couple of reasons for why you might want to publish one yourself!

You can point people to your website instead of repeating yourself

The old adage says “if you say it three times, write it down”. I’ve told people to use uv many times; same with Claude Code, or fzf, or power banks, or creatine. At some point, I figured out it’s better to just write everything up somewhere on my website so I can just link people to it instead of repeating myself.

You should write all of this down anyway for your LLMs to see

If you are using an LLM to assist you in your daily life, say to decide what to buy; it is in general a good idea to give the LLM a lot of context on who you are and what your preferences are; otherwise you will get bland, generic answers. Consider the difference between a human assistant who knows nothing about you, versus another that knows all your habits and daily preferences; the one with more context will need much less guidance. If you use AI to help you on various lifestyle decisions, a “User manual” for your preferences is very useful.

Posting a subset of this online instead of in your system prompt also allows other people to see it. Whether you think this is good or bad depends on whether you like helping strangers who have similar worldviews as you, or not. I do.

An LLM does not have lived experience as a human, and thus when asked to do anything, it will synthesize the answer from what people wrote they do, either in its training data or from web searches.

Various other benefits that might also be considered downsides depending on your perspective

• You get a dopamine hit as a reward for spending time on improving something in your setup. This is generally more valuable than you think.

• It is a great place to share your opinions on things in a structured way.

• It’s easier for people to buy gifts for you without asking you what you want.

• You come off as more opinionated and having a stronger personality.

• People will give you unsolicited advice on what you should use.

• People will send you their Stacks and lists of Stacks they like.

Downsides to posting your Stack

The first issue is that your Stack will go out of date if you do not update it.

The second issue is the security concerns with your software stack. If you are a high-value target (this includes lab employees and crypto-rich individuals), and it is possible adversaries would burn a zero-day vulnerability on you, you should avoid publishing some of your software stack. Security by obscurity is good in this case.

Other Stack posts I like

• Derek Sivers’ uses page popularized the concept

• nearcyan’s supplements page

• Bilal Chughtai’s products page

• Vitalik’s backpack travel guide

• Vincent Cheng’s 1% improvements

• Gavin Leech’s stuff

Feel free to send me more examples you like!

1. The terminology comes from Asara Near:

Actually works irrespective of gender.