Stack crib 2025-2026 — the tour and the tech-radar underneath

• Thoughtworks Tech Radar — the canonical org-level format. Quadrants (Techniques, Tools, Platforms, Languages & Frameworks) × rings (Adopt, Trial, Assess, Hold). Published semi-annually. Cited by ClearScore, RIO, OneUptime, and dozens of engineering blogs in 2026.
• usesthis.com — the individual-dev equivalent, running since 2010. Interviews about hardware, software, and workflow.
• MTV Cribs for engineering orgs — doesn't exist as a genre. The tour format has been parodied for garages, dorms, homelabs, and terminal setups (mostly on TikTok and YouTube), but there is no established engineering-org version. This note fills the gap and makes it useful by ending in a real radar.

Numbers below come from a 2026-09-08 survey of the jwalsh/* org (86 repos) and aygp-dr/* org (447 repos).

You are looking at 533 repositories across two GitHub orgs. Come on in.

There is a Makefile in almost every one of them. 58 in jwalsh, 286 in aygp-dr. Nobody around here has ever heard of just.

Behind the door: a persistent emacs --daemon inside tmux, connected to a CIDER session, jacked into a Clojure nREPL on 127.0.0.1:42527. Every clj eval, every cljs build, every site query goes through that one JVM. Twelve seconds of JVM startup per throwaway clojure -M invocation would burn the entire session budget. So it doesn't happen.

No JIRA. No Trello. No Linear.

beads — a git-backed task store, polyglot (Go core, TypeScript on npm, Python on PyPI, Ruby). The task DB lives in the repo, versioned like any other file. bd ready shows unblocked work. bd close <id> finishes it. bd sync && git push ships it. Merges resolve like any other conflict; there is no separate SaaS to keep in sync.

Found in 15+ jwalsh repos, 30+ aygp-dr repos. Every mature project that agents touch has a .beads/ directory next to .git/.

TRAMP over SSH to DreamHost VPS. The site deploys through Emacs. org-publish writes files directly to /ssh:www_wal_sh@vps47738.dreamhostps.com:~/wal.sh/ as if it were a local path. There is no CI/CD pipeline in the conventional sense; the laptop is the CI runner and the deploy tool is the text editor.

This is the only place in the two orgs where deploy happens this way. Everywhere else it's rsync-over-SSH, Docker Compose, or GitHub Pages. The wal.sh pattern is a signature, not a convention.

CLAUDE.md in every repo. 27 in jwalsh, 159 in aygp-dr — nearly universal in mature projects. Codebase context, architecture, path-safety rules, deploy tier classification. When an agent enters a repo it reads CLAUDE.md first and knows the local conventions before touching anything.

MCP servers wired up: Atlassian, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Hugging Face, Slack, Uber (yes), plus a self-hosted claude-in-chrome extension for browser automation. Agent runs at Sonnet 4.6 by default; Opus 4.7 in /fast mode with a 1M-context window for research work.

org-mode. Everything is literate. The site source is site/*.org. Diagrams live inline as #+begin_src dot :file <name>.png blocks — never loose .dot files. Code lives inline as #+begin_src clojure blocks with #+RESULTS: evidence underneath. Property drawers on headings carry :VERIFIED_AT:, :VERDICT:, :FINDING: metadata that turns any assertion into an auditable claim.

The .cljc / .cljs split (pure reducer core, thin browser adapter) is now the shape for every new interactive artifact — see the TOC rail highlighter and the poll SPA for two 2026-09 examples on this repo alone.

clojure.test.check property tests against the pure .cljc cores. pytest for Python work. fast-check for the JS mirrors when they exist (see agent-federation-harness). cloverage on the Clojure side. No mutation testing in CI; done ad-hoc when a decision warrants it.

Verification convention that recurs: hash-chain audit ledger (.verify/chain.jsonl). Every validation appends a block binding the change hash + the verifier to the previous block's hash; tamper-evident by construction.

The site wal.sh/tools/*, wal.sh/research/*, wal.sh/current/* is the source of truth for specs. Other repos in both orgs link back to wal.sh URLs from their READMEs:

• transform-tool-rs (Rust/WASM impl) → wal.sh/tools/transform/
• crowsnest (agent observability) → wal.sh/tools/crowsnest/spec-v3
• wal-sh-adtech-ts-001..002 (TypeScript cleanroom reimplementations) → wal.sh/research/browser-adtech-infra/

Specs are versioned; implementations pin to a research-site commit hash in their README. The publishing pipeline is deliberately one-way: research site → dependent repos, never the reverse.

The tour is over. Here is the same information in the format an engineering director would actually accept.

The crib framing is only worth writing if the radar underneath is honest. Two ways this note is falsifiable:

1. If in 6 months any Adopt item has been dropped, that adoption was provisional and the tier was wrong. Re-tier or delete.
2. If any Hold item lands anyway, either the reasoning was wrong or the constraint changed. Note the change; leave the crossed-out original for the audit trail.

• docs/dynamic-globals-plan.org — the boot loader plan in Trial
• TOC rail scrollspy note — the .cljc split pattern in the wild
• Poll SPA — the deadpan-serious-in-a-joke-frame precedent
• Thoughtworks Radar — the format this ends in
• usesthis.com — the individual-dev sibling of this format