Essential AI Tools

The AI tools every serious user should know about. Not the newest or the loudest, just the ones that set the bar in their category and quietly do the job day after day. Start here if you're new.

Essential AI Tools

The AI tools every serious user should know about. Not the newest or the loudest, just the ones that set the bar in their category and quietly do the job day after day. Start here if you're new.

Essential AI Tools

The AI tools every serious user should know about. Not the newest or the loudest, just the ones that set the bar in their category and quietly do the job day after day. Start here if you're new.

Perplexity

Answer Engine

Perplexity is an answer engine that reads the web for you and writes a sourced summary, with footnote-style citations under every claim. Free tier covers everyday lookups; Pro ($20/mo) unlocks unlimited Pro Search, Deep Research, and the Comet browser agent. The Sonar and Search APIs let developers wire the same real-time web Q&A into their own products.

NotebookLM

Source-Grounded Research Notebook

NotebookLM is Google's AI research notebook that grounds every answer in sources the user uploads (PDFs, Google Docs, slides, web URLs, YouTube videos, audio files), with citations linking back to exact passages. Aimed at students, researchers, and knowledge workers synthesizing material across documents.

Midjourney

Stylized Image Generator

Midjourney is an AI image and short-form video generator that produces highly stylized visuals from text prompts and reference images, accessed through a web app at midjourney.com (with legacy Discord access still supported). It now also animates still images into 5-second clips that extend up to 21 seconds.

Grammarly

Writing Assistant

Grammarly is an AI writing assistant for grammar, tone, clarity, and drafting that runs in browsers, desktop apps, mobile, and email. Now part of Superhuman alongside Coda and Superhuman Mail under one bundled suite.

Granola

Meeting Notes Assistant

Granola is an AI meeting notepad that transcribes your computer's audio directly and enhances your raw notes after each call, without joining as a bot. Built for product, sales, and investing teams running back-to-back meetings on Zoom, Meet, Teams, and in person.

Figma

Interface Design Platform

Figma is a collaborative interface design platform that includes Figma Design, Dev Mode, FigJam, Figma Slides, Figma Draw, Figma Make, Figma Sites, and Figma Buzz under one workspace. Used by designers, engineers, and product managers from startups to Fortune 500 companies.

Cursor

Agentic Code Editor

Cursor is an AI-first IDE forked from VS Code, with Tab autocomplete, agentic Composer chat, semantic codebase indexing, a CLI, Slack integration, and cloud agents. Built for developers and engineering teams running frontier models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and xAI inside their editor.

ChatGPT

General-Purpose Assistant

ChatGPT is OpenAI's general-purpose conversational AI assistant for writing, research, coding, data analysis, and image generation. Available on web, mobile, and desktop across Free, Go, Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise tiers.

Claude Code

Agentic Coding Tool

Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool that reads codebases, edits files, runs tests, and ships pull requests from the terminal, VS Code, JetBrains, Slack, the web, or a desktop app. Built for developers working with Claude Sonnet and Opus models inside their existing stack.