Research brief: Candid Creative 2026 Build-Standards — web stack decision framework for SMB marketing sites & lightweight apps (piece 16)

Status: Research material — not a finished article. Compiled May 22, 2026.

TL;DR

• Default stack for 90% of Candid Creative work in 2026: Astro 5/6 with the Content Layer API, deployed on Cloudflare Pages/Workers, styled with Tailwind v4, with Postgres + pgvector when a data layer is needed. See RULE: Default stack for new marketing-site work is Astro 5/6 + Tailwind v4 on Cloudflare Pages.
• The biggest 2025–2026 platform shifts: same-document View Transitions Baseline (Oct 14, 2025); Speculation Rules in Chromium today; INP replaced FID March 2024; Tailwind v4 Oxide; React Compiler 1.0 (Oct 7, 2025); Next.js 16 "Cache Components" (Oct 2025).
• AI-assisted development is the productivity moat for a 1-3 person KW shop. Claude Code + Cursor/Copilot is the dominant enterprise pattern; see AI-assisted dev productivity 2026: published evidence ranges from 21-28% speedup (GovTech) to 19% slowdown (METR RCT) — honest ceiling is 1.3-1.7× for fluent users.

See also Research brief: The Case Against Page Builders (piece 10 of 15), Research brief: Built to Last — why most SMB sites rebuild every 3-4 years (piece 5 of 15), and Research brief: Page Speed as a Moat — why CWV separates the agencies from the freelancers (piece 9 of 15) which this brief extends with framework-choice and progressive-enhancement primitives.