💭 in your head · nothing to type
Four stacks — not a "good and bad" list, but four candidates for a long road together 🧭.
Don't picture this as a feature comparison sheet. Picture choosing not a tool but a travelling companion. One is reliable and predictable but demands resources. Another is free and cheap but leaves everything resting on you. A third is the one who's there when the others are out of reach. You're not after "the best in general" — you're after the one who fits your temperament, your budget, your plans.
Catch that feeling in your head: who are you walking with right now? — then click the matching card below.
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Interactive block — on the site: open →
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💡 Your selection is remembered in the browser. In later units, command and hands-on sections will be filtered to match. You can change it anytime — click another card or use the stack switcher.
💭 in your head · nothing to type
You've just picked a companion — but long roads are rarely walked by two. Picture an orchestra with no conductor 🎻. Each musician is brilliant — but without coordination, you get noise, not a symphony.
Return to the orchestra without a conductor: even brilliant musicians make noise when nobody holds the shared beat.
What single role should your stack's conductor take on?
A stack can combine a primary for nuanced work, a floor for offline work, and a fast-path for boilerplate. LiteLLM is the conductor: the agent calls one endpoint while the model gateway routes requests in order and switches to fallbacks.
No stack is "best" — each has its angle:
| Aspect | Claude Code | Sovereign | Cloud-OSS | Behind-Firewall |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Out-of-box quality | 9/10 | 7/10 | 7/10 | 6/10 |
| Setup time | 5 min | half a day for the learning minimum (local LiteLLM + one local model); full stack — weeks | 30 min | 1 hour |
| Price/month | $20+ | $0 + hw | $0–5 | $0 |
| Privacy | low | maximum | medium | medium |
| Speed | medium | high (local) | variable | very high (Cerebras) |
| Vendor lock-in (dependence on one provider) | Anthropic | none | OpenRouter/provider | Cerebras/Google |
| China and Russia access | needs VPN in China, closed in Russia | works | variable | works |