RESOURCEBEGINNER
Cool Tools for AI, Cyber, and Builders
The stack I actually use and recommend — not the one that makes a better screenshot.
Everything here earns its place by being reached for weekly. Anything I installed, admired and abandoned is deliberately absent.
Local AI
- Ollama — the shortest path from “I want to try this model” to running it. Model management is the actual feature.
- llama.cpp — when you need to control quantization and context layout rather than accept defaults.
Cyber
- Wireshark — still the fastest way to find out what is actually on the wire versus what the docs claim.
- Burp Suite Community — enough for real work on web targets.
Homelab
- Proxmox VE — the hypervisor. Snapshots make experiments cheap, which is the whole point of a lab.
- Tailscale — flat networking without opening ports at the edge.
Building
- Tree-sitter — real parsing instead of regex over source code.
- SQLite — the correct default database for roughly everything on this list.
The filter
If a tool needs a subscription to be useful at the scale I work at, it is not on this list. Not on principle — it just means I would stop using it the month I stopped paying, and then it was never part of the stack.