My 2026 Development Stack: What Changed and Why

Every year I take stock of what’s in my development stack and what shifted. 2025 brought bigger changes than usual — a new frontend framework, a fundamentally different approach to WordPress, and AI tools that went from “nice to have” to “can’t imagine working without.” Here’s the full breakdown.

Editor: VS Code + Claude Code

VS Code is still the editor. I’ve tried alternatives (Zed, Cursor) but keep coming back to the extension ecosystem and muscle memory. What changed is the AI layer. I run Claude Code as my primary AI coding tool — it operates in the terminal, reads my entire project, and can edit files, run commands, and execute multi-step tasks autonomously.

The shift from “AI autocomplete” to “AI agent that understands my codebase” was the single biggest productivity change this year. I describe what I want, and it reads the relevant files, makes the changes, runs the tests, and iterates until it works. For repetitive tasks like creating new pages that follow existing patterns, it’s 5-10x faster than doing it manually.

Frontend: Next.js 15 + React 19 + Tailwind v4

I moved from a Vite + React SPA to Next.js 15 with App Router. The reasons:

• Server components — fetching data on the server and sending rendered HTML is faster than loading a JS bundle that then fetches data. First Contentful Paint improved significantly.
• Built-in routing — file-based routing with layouts, loading states, and error boundaries. No more route config files.
• Image optimization — Next.js Image component with automatic WebP/AVIF conversion and lazy loading. My portfolio images went from 2MB page loads to 200KB.
• ISR (Incremental Static Regeneration) — pages revalidate in the background so content stays fresh without full rebuilds.

React 19’s compiler eliminates the need for manual useMemo and useCallback optimization in most cases, which is a relief. I deleted dozens of unnecessary memoization calls.

Tailwind v4 simplified configuration significantly. The new CSS-first config approach means my tailwind.config.js is gone — theme tokens live directly in CSS with @theme blocks. It feels cleaner.

Backend: Headless WordPress

WordPress is now purely a headless CMS — it serves content via the REST API, and the Next.js frontend handles all rendering. The WordPress site lives at wp.adzbyte.com and the public site is a Next.js app.

Why not switch to a purpose-built headless CMS like Sanity or Strapi? Because WordPress already has my content, my custom post types are set up, and the REST API does everything I need. Migrating content to a new CMS would’ve been a week of work with no tangible benefit.

The headless setup requires more infrastructure — CORS config, separate deployments, custom API endpoints — but the performance and DX gains are worth it.

Deployment: Docker + VPS

WordPress runs in Docker (WordPress + MariaDB + Nginx) on a VPS. The Next.js frontend deploys to Vercel. This split makes sense: WordPress needs a persistent server with a database, while Next.js is perfect for edge deployment.

Docker Compose handles the WordPress stack with a single config file including SSL via Certbot. Backups are automated daily dumps to offsite storage.

Styling: Tailwind v4

I mentioned Tailwind v4 under frontend, but it deserves its own section because of how much the workflow changed. The big wins:

• CSS-first configuration — theme values defined in CSS, not JavaScript
• Container queries — native @container support with @sm, @md, @lg variants
• Faster builds — the new engine is built in Rust and noticeably faster on large projects
• No more purge config — detection is automatic

AI Tools

Beyond Claude Code as my primary coding agent, I use AI in a few other ways:

• Local models via Ollama — for quick questions when I don’t want to context-switch, and for autocomplete in VS Code
• RAG on documentation — a local setup that indexes project docs and API references for conversational queries
• Image generation — for blog post featured images and placeholder graphics
• Code review — AI review on every PR before human review catches the obvious stuff

What I Dropped

Some things left the stack:

• Webpack — replaced by Vite for the WordPress theme, Next.js handles its own bundling
• SCSS — Tailwind handles everything. I haven’t written a .scss file in months.
• jQuery — finally, truly, completely gone from my projects
• Postman — I test APIs with curl or the REST Client VS Code extension

What stayed: TypeScript, Git, WordPress as a CMS, Vitest for testing, GitHub Actions for CI/CD, and the MacBook Pro. Stable, proven choices I have no reason to change.

The biggest meta-shift is that my stack is now optimized around AI-assisted development. Project structure and documentation practices are designed to give AI tools maximum context. Code that’s well-typed, well-documented, and follows consistent patterns isn’t just good engineering — it’s better AI-assisted engineering too.