Stack / lifeintraffic

About Stack

Every article here has a verdict. If I can't tell you which one to use, I haven't done enough work yet.

Written by
CR
Published
24
Since
Jun 2026
Parent
Life in Traffic

Why this exists

Most LLM comparison content is either vendor-funded, scraped from spec sheets, or written by someone who ran a single benchmark and called it a review.

Stack exists because I kept needing to make real decisions — which API to use for a production app, whether to pay for Claude when GPT-4o was "good enough", how to actually get AI to do something useful in a code review without it hallucinating half the suggestions. The content I found online wasn't helping.

So I started writing it down. Which providers I reach for and why. What AI actually helps with in a dev workflow versus where it confidently gets things wrong. The gaps between what the benchmarks say and what happens when you ship something.

Who's writing this

Sr Software Engineer is my day job. Outside of that, I build small software projects and write about what I learn at Life In Traffic. Stack is one part of that — the part focused specifically on LLM tooling for developers.

Method

I use AI to help write these articles. That's worth saying plainly on a site about AI tools.

The structure, the research, the first draft — a lot of that is generated. What I add is the part that can't be: the specific provider I actually reached for last week, the workflow that broke down in a surprising way, the opinion that contradicts the consensus because I tested it myself.

Sources are checked before they're cited. Every reference on this site resolved when its article was written, and every embedded video was verified as playable.

Articles 24
With sources 24
Sources cited 119

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