Skip to content

stack-heuristics.md

Latest commit

 

History

History
75 lines (58 loc) · 5.41 KB

stack-heuristics.md

File metadata and controls

75 lines (58 loc) · 5.41 KB
Raw

Stack heuristics

Mapping rules from checklist signals to recommended stack families. Use these when proposing candidates in action 02. Heuristics, not laws - override when audit (action 03) flags a conflict.

Architecture pattern

Signal (from checklist) Pattern
Solo or 2-dev team, < 10k users, < 5 features, no real-time Monolith
Mid-size team, growing features, want clean modules Modular monolith
Many decoupled domains, each with its own scaling profile Microservices
Bursty traffic, low ops budget, short-lived requests, no persistent connections Serverless
Real-time + low latency required + WebSockets Monolith / serverless edge (avoid pure microservices)

Front-end

Signal Recommendation
SEO important + content-heavy Next.js SSR or Astro SSR
SEO not important + interactive dashboard Vite + React SPA
Mobile native required React Native / Expo + web app
Marketing site + product app Astro (marketing) + Next.js (app) or Next.js everything
Offline-first (PWA, local sync) Next.js + service worker or RxDB-based stack

Back-end

Signal Recommendation
Team knows TypeScript, no exotic perf needs Next.js API routes or NestJS
Team knows Python, ML/data-heavy FastAPI
Team knows Go, high-throughput backend Echo / Fiber
Real-time chat, websockets, live sync Node + Socket.io or Phoenix (Elixir)
Heavy compute (video, ML inference) FastAPI + worker queue (Celery / BullMQ)

Database

Signal Recommendation
Relational data, transactions, GDPR PostgreSQL (Supabase, Neon, RDS)
Document-shaped data, schema fluctuates often MongoDB or Postgres JSONB
Existing Airtable as source of truth Airtable SDK + Postgres cache layer
Search-heavy (full-text, faceted) Postgres + tsvector OR Postgres + Meilisearch
Real-time pub/sub Supabase Realtime or Redis pub/sub
Event sourcing Postgres + outbox pattern

Auth

Signal Recommendation
Next.js + Postgres NextAuth (Auth.js)
Need polished UI, magic links, OAuth, no time to build Clerk
Already on Supabase Supabase Auth
Enterprise SSO required Auth0 or WorkOS
B2B with org-level access control Clerk Organizations or WorkOS

Hosting

Signal Recommendation
Next.js + low ops budget Vercel
Solo dev + Postgres + bootstrap budget Vercel + Supabase or Railway
Heavy backend, custom infra AWS (ECS / Fargate) or GCP Cloud Run
EU data residency required Scaleway, OVH, or AWS eu-west-3
Self-hosted preference Coolify or Dokku on VPS

Conflicting-signal triage

When two signals push to different stacks, prioritize in this order:

  1. Data sensitivity (GDPR/health) - overrides hosting region preference
  2. Real-time + multi-tenant - overrides cost preference (forces non-trivial backend)
  3. Team language expertise - overrides "best tool" if learning curve > 2 weeks
  4. Budget - caps everything else; prune candidates that exceed it

When still ambiguous, surface the trade-off to the user in the comparison table (action 02) instead of choosing silently.