The Journal
·13 min read
Building Developer Tools That Actually Help
“I built Superstack to stop paying for Claude's noise, and CodeHandoff to stop losing my AI sessions between Macs. A first-person case study on both — the problems, the architectures, the numbers, and what shipping a million small developer tools taught me.”
Frequently asked questions
- What is Superstack?
- Superstack is a local runtime layer that sits between your IDE/CLI and Claude. It compresses outbound context, caches repeat content, and routes simple prompts to cheaper models — producing 38–53% average output token reduction and 89–98% A/B win rates across Claude Haiku 4.5, Sonnet 4.5, Opus 4.6, and Opus 4.7, with quality measurably improved.
- How much does Superstack cost?
- Superstack is free forever for solo developers. Teams pay for shared configs, fleet analytics, and per-developer spend dashboards. The install is a single command — curl -sSL superstack.now/i | bash — and works with Claude Code, Claude Desktop, Cursor, Aider, Cline, Continue, Zed, RooCode, Goose, and OpenClaw.
- How does CodeHandoff sync Claude sessions between Macs?
- CodeHandoff uses an architecture I call Shadow Sync. Claude keeps writing to its native ~/.claude folder. A FSEvents watcher mirrors changes to a synced shadow copy in real time, and rclone keeps the shadow copies on every Mac eventually consistent. A small SQLite ledger resolves conflicts. When you sit at a second Mac, your sessions are already there — no rebase, no merge, no manual intervention.
- Is CodeHandoff a subscription?
- No. CodeHandoff is $9.99 one-time, unlimited Macs, lifetime updates. The purchase price is roughly the same as one month of lost productivity when your AI session is on the wrong machine.
- What stack did you build Superstack and CodeHandoff in?
- Superstack is a TypeScript daemon that runs locally on your machine, intercepting LLM traffic via a small proxy. CodeHandoff is a native macOS app — Swift for the UI/agent, Rust for the sync core, FSEvents for change detection, rclone for transport, and a LaunchAgent for background operation. Both ship as a single binary with no Electron or Docker overhead.
- How do I verify the 38–53% token reduction claim?
- The methodology and harness are documented at superstack.now/methodology. I A/B tested 47 prompts per model with and without Superstack, measured token counts and response quality via paired scoring, and re-run the suite on every Claude model release. Raw numbers and prompts are published.
