The interesting parts of a project are not always the AI model or the hosting platform. This week I spent time reading source code for five dependencies that sit quietly in my package.json files. None of them are trending. All of them are load-bearing.
My stack is Astro 5 SSG + Turso libSQL + GitHub Actions cron + Claude Haiku 4.5. Three sites: Top AI Tools, Find Games Like, Open Alternative To. Seven weeks in, still under 400 total pageviews, but the infrastructure is solid enough that I can focus on content rather than firefighting.
tsx — TypeScript without the build ceremony
tsx by Hiroki Osame is how I run every ETL script in the monorepo. The command tsx src/etl/run.ts just works — no tsconfig fiddling, no ts-node --esm flags, no separate compile step. Under the hood it uses esbuild, which means startup is fast enough that a five-second cron warm-up doesn't matter.
What surprised me when I read the repo: tsx strips types with esbuild rather than the TypeScript compiler, so it doesn't type-check. That's intentional. For ETL scripts where I want pnpm typecheck to catch structural errors at CI time but not slow down the hot path, this is exactly the right tradeoff. The README calls this out clearly. I wish I'd read it three weeks ago instead of assuming tsx did full type checking.
