The AI tools our team uses every single day (and the ones we quietly dropped)

Our actual stack, no sponsorships

We run ToolBees — a directory of AI tools — so people assume we try everything. We do try a lot. But what we actually use every day is a much shorter list.

Here's the honest version.

Tools we use every single day

Claude (Anthropic)

Our go-to for anything that needs long, structured writing. Blog posts, documentation, email drafts. Claude follows nuanced instructions better than anything else we've tried and its outputs read more naturally.

Cursor

Our entire dev team switched to Cursor from VS Code. The AI tab completion and the ability to ask questions about your own codebase in context is a genuine productivity unlock.

Perplexity

Replaced Google for research. When we need to understand a topic quickly with citations we can actually verify, Perplexity is faster and more trustworthy than a search results page.

Midjourney

Blog cover images, social graphics, concept mockups. Still the best quality-to-effort ratio for image generation in our experience.

Tools we quietly dropped

Jasper

Great product. Just too expensive for a small team when Claude does 90% of the same job for less. No shade — just honest math.

Runway Gen-2

We got excited about AI video. The reality is we don't produce enough video content to justify the cost and the learning curve. Shelved for now.

An AI meeting transcription tool (you know the ones)

We tried three. All of them created more work than they saved because the summaries needed heavy editing. We went back to just writing our own notes.

The pattern we noticed

The tools we kept are the ones that fit into how we already work, not the ones that required us to change our workflow around them.