Transcription: OpenAgents Episode 002 - Choosing a Tech Stack

Source: https://twitter.com/OpenAgentsInc/status/1721966796515754266 Wiki source: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/wiki/OpenAgentsInc/openagents/Video-Series.md Media title: OpenAgents - Episode 002: Choosing a Tech Stack We decide to start OpenAgents as a ... Upload date: 20231107 Transcription model: gpt-4o-transcribe-diarize Generated at: 2026-05-31T23:52:36Z

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[00:01] Christopher David: Okay, if this is how we want to build the project,

[00:05] Christopher David: what should our tech stack be?

[00:08] Christopher David: One option would be to do this as a desktop app using something like TauRi with a front end in React and embedded back end in Rust.

[00:19] Christopher David: That would give us access to the user's GPUs and be able to do cool things with that.

[00:26] Christopher David: Part of me wants to go that route,

[00:28] Christopher David: but if the priorities are to ship early and often and make it as easy as possible to collect feedback from users to make sure we're building the right thing,

[00:36] Christopher David: then a web app probably is best given also that we want this to be sort of a drop-in replacement for or at least users to have the same form factor as what OpenAI is building and they're building everything on the web and then later adding mobile support.

[00:52] Christopher David: So let's do a web app.

[00:55] Christopher David: I think that makes the most sense, at least for now.

[00:58] Christopher David: So this open agents website here,

[01:03] Christopher David: GitHub repo,

[01:05] Christopher David: will have the code for a web app.

[01:08] Christopher David: And what should we use? I think ChatGPT uses Next.js and the logical place for hosting. I don't know if they're hosted on Vercel, but usually there's Vercel is where people are.

[01:22] Christopher David: hosting next.js apps and that's an option um the gp utopia website currently uses versel um but i've been kind of frustrated with that the server actions and some of the like newer edge function stuff has been kind of confusing and they're like kind of explicitly now starting to borrow patterns from php

[01:48] Christopher David: So maybe

[01:53] Christopher David: we should just use PHP.

[01:57] Christopher David: Here's an example of levels top AI indie hacker making a bunch of MRR with just a single file for PHP.

[02:09] Christopher David: So I want it to be more maintainable than that.

[02:14] Christopher David: And it just so happens that I happen to have the most experience personally with Laravel, which is the top PHP web framework,

[02:22] Christopher David: according to me.

[02:23] Christopher David: And I don't know, it's the most popular,

[02:25] Christopher David: I think.

[02:26] Christopher David: This also is what I've started building the previous agent's website in, and we're going to pull the other code from this into our new repo. I want to start it from scratch so you all can kind of follow along.

[02:40] Christopher David: So, let's make a couple notes here about what the stack is going to be.

[02:47] Christopher David: So we'll call this tech stack.

[02:49] Christopher David: We're going to use Laravel.

[02:51] Christopher David: Laravel gives you a choice of using either their front-end templating language called Blade or using a front-end framework.

[03:02] Christopher David: And we are going to use a front-end framework.

[03:05] Christopher David: um they offer support for react or view i think maybe svelte again i'm most familiar with react that matters and also a bunch of open source ai code seems to be written more in react than other things um so i think that's logical as well as i'd like to use those um shad ui components although i guess those are for more frameworks than just react

[03:34] Christopher David: Or maybe not.

[03:35] Christopher David: I think it's just React.

[03:38] Christopher David: Okay, so Laravel,

[03:39] Christopher David: React,

[03:39] Christopher David: there's an official project that kind of glues Laravel together with React called Inertia. I'm also using that in that agent's site.

[03:55] Christopher David: Yeah.

[03:56] Christopher David: Server-driven web app, modern monolith.

[03:59] Christopher David: Create fully client-side rendered single-page apps without the complexity that comes with modern single-page apps.

[04:05] Christopher David: Leveraging existing server-side patterns that you already love.

[04:10] Christopher David: Fine-tune for Laravel.

[04:19] Christopher David: What else? We are definitely going to use Tailwind for CSS.

[04:23] Christopher David: These days when you start up a Laravel app with inertia,

[04:26] Christopher David: it's like the components are already built for you in Tailwind CSS.

[04:36] Christopher David: Anything else we need to choose?

[04:41] Christopher David: For database,

[04:42] Christopher David: Laravel generally works with MySQL.

[04:48] Christopher David: I think it might be worth trying to use, I think it also works well with Postgres.

[04:56] Christopher David: We might want Postgres for PG Vector.

[05:07] Christopher David: Are we going to want to host our own embeddings on our local database?

[05:14] Christopher David: For now, I'll just put MySQL or Postgres. We might want to start with one and then upgrade to the other later.

[05:21] Christopher David: Need to see what our hosting environment supports.

[05:28] Christopher David: Anything else?

[05:32] Christopher David: And we want to use, to make it as easy as possible for component development,

[05:38] Christopher David: we're just going to use Shad UI components to build up our interfaces.

[05:41] Christopher David: These are beautiful React components.

[05:58] Christopher David: We'll call that our tech stack. We can always evolve this later on.

[06:04] Christopher David: And in the next video we will set up our Laravel project.