The tools we'd bet
the shop on

Claude

The model we actually trust with the hard sentences.

Anthropic's flagship. Reads long context like a human would and writes prose that doesn't reek of a chatbot.

ChatGPT

The Swiss Army knife. Dulled in places, still in the drawer.

OpenAI's consumer product remains the most versatile generalist — voice, images, code, search, all under one roof.

Gemini

Google finally showed up, and it brought receipts.

Massive context window, deep integration with Google's stack, and a quiet competence that snuck up on everyone.

Perplexity

Google killer — at least on Tuesdays.

Answer engine that cites sources by default. Replaces the first ten search results with something you can actually use.

ElevenLabs

Voice synthesis that stopped sounding like a kidnapping note.

The voice models everyone else is chasing. Studio-quality narration, multilingual cloning, real-time conversation.

Cursor

VS Code, but it finally read your codebase.

An editor built around the assumption that the model is sitting next to you, not in a chat window across the room.

Claude Code

The agent that actually finishes the ticket.

Anthropic's terminal-native coding agent. Plans, executes, tests, commits. Treats your repo like a senior engineer would.

Lovable

From idea to deployed app in the time it takes to brief a designer.

Build full-stack web apps by describing them. The fastest path from sketch to working product we've found.

Vercel

Deploys that just work. Pricing that occasionally doesn't.

The default host for modern web apps. Push to main, the world sees it. The DX nobody has matched.

Supabase

Postgres with the rough edges sanded down.

Auth, database, storage, edge functions. Open source. Doesn't lock you in. Doesn't get in your way.

Linear

The project tracker that respects your time.

Fast, opinionated, beautifully built. The only issue tracker we've used that the whole team actually opens unprompted.

Notion

The everything-doc. For better and worse.

Docs, wikis, databases, light project management. The connective tissue of most companies under 200 people.

Granola

The meeting notes app that ended the meeting notes problem.

Listens to your calls, watches you scribble, produces notes that read like you wrote them at your best.

Raycast

Spotlight, if Apple still cared about Spotlight.

A keyboard-driven launcher that quietly replaces ten apps you didn't realize you were tolerating.

Superhuman

Expensive email. Worth every cent if email is the job.

A keyboard-driven email client built for people who get hundreds of messages a day and intend to win.

Arc

A browser with opinions. Mostly the right ones.

The Browser Company's swing at reinventing the address bar, the tab strip, and the whole muscle memory.

Figma

The design tool that ate the rest. Deservedly.

Vector design, prototyping, multiplayer editing. The default surface for any team that ships an interface.

Framer

Marketing sites for people who want them yesterday.

Design and publish production websites without leaving the canvas. CMS, animations, responsive — all in one tool.

Exa

Search built for agents, useful for humans.

A semantic search API that returns the pages an LLM actually needs. The plumbing under a lot of good research tools.

Reflect

A notes app that finally treats your thinking as graph, not file system.

Networked notes with backlinks, an AI assistant that knows your whole vault, and end-to-end encryption.

Grok

The model with a chip on its shoulder and a live feed in its ear.

xAI's flagship. Real-time access to the public conversation and a tone that doesn't apologize for having one.

Mistral

The European answer, lean and open where it counts.

Fast, efficient models with proper open weights and a price point that makes pipelines actually viable.

Llama

Meta's open model — the one that broke the dam.

The frontier-adjacent weights you can actually download. Whatever your feelings about Meta, this one changed the game.

v0

Vercel's UI generator — the fastest path to a passable component.

Type a description, get a clean shadcn-flavored component back. Good for unblocking the blank canvas.

Bolt

Browser-native dev environment with the model in the driver's seat.

StackBlitz's WebContainers plus an LLM. Spin up a full-stack app from a prompt without touching your local machine.

GitHub

The shared memory of every team that ships software.

Git hosting, code review, CI, issues, the lot. Boring, dominant, and quietly the backbone of the trade.

Things

A to-do app that respects you enough to stay out of the way.

Cultured Code's flagship. No collaboration, no AI, no nonsense — just the calmest, best-designed task manager on the Mac.

Midjourney

The image model with actual taste.

Still the most opinionated, painterly image generator out there. Other tools are more controllable; none have the same eye.

Runway

The video model that quietly went pro.

Gen-3 and beyond. Text-to-video, image-to-video, plus a real timeline for the work that comes after the generation.

Elicit

Literature review with the librarian still in the room.

Ask a research question, get a structured table of actual papers with extracted findings. Built for people who care if it's true.

Resend

Email infrastructure that doesn't make you want to quit the trade.

Developer-first transactional email with React components for templates and a deliverability story that actually holds up.

Beehiiv

The newsletter platform built by people who actually ran a newsletter.

Substack's serious competitor — with referrals, ads, a real editor, and analytics that aren't a black box.

Attio

The CRM that finally figured out you're not a 2009 enterprise sales team.

Flexible, data-model-first CRM that feels like Airtable grew up and got serious about pipeline.

Webflow

Visual development that respects the underlying web.

The original 'design tool that ships real HTML/CSS' bet. Still the most powerful no-code option when the brand bar is high.

Customer.io

Lifecycle messaging without the drag-and-drop infantilization.

Event-driven email, SMS, and push with a visual workflow builder that doesn't pretend you're not technical.

PostHog

Product analytics, session replay, flags, and experiments under one roof.

The open-source bundle that replaced four SaaS bills with one and didn't lose anything in the trade.

Metabase

The BI tool your non-SQL team can actually use without crying.

Open-source dashboards and queries with a question-builder that turns business users into self-serve analysts.

Dub

Link management with analytics that don't insult your intelligence.

Open-source Bitly alternative with custom domains, deep analytics, QR codes, and an API worth building on.

Plausible

Site analytics that don't require a cookie banner or a lawyer.

Privacy-first, lightweight, GDPR-clean web analytics. One dashboard, no bloat, no tracking your users for someone else.

MotherDuck

DuckDB in the cloud — and quietly the most fun analytics is having.

Serverless DuckDB with seamless local-to-cloud hybrid execution. The data warehouse for people who think Snowflake is overkill.

Descript

Edit audio and video by editing the transcript. Still feels like a magic trick.

Podcast and video editing where text is the timeline. Cuts, filler-word removal, voice cloning, screen recording, the works.

CapCut

The editor that quietly trained a generation of creators.

ByteDance's free, capable, vertical-first video editor. The lingua franca of anyone shipping short-form video.