Five tools. That's the whole stack.

I've tried dozens of AI tools. Five survived. Each one does something the others can't, and I use all of them daily.

Claude is where I build. Cowork mode, code, this website, skills, folder systems, the whole workflow engine. If it touches my work output, it runs through Claude. 100% of my coding happens here now.

ChatGPT is where I think out loud. Fast, personal, great for brainstorming and actual conversation. This is AI chat the way we all started using AI chat, and GPT is still the best at that. Four years of conversation history in there too, so it knows me. Image generation has also gotten really good.

Gemini surprised me. The killer feature is Gems. I package up four or five documents I've created (a PowerPoint, a PRD, technical specs, whatever) into a Gem, then share it with my team. Instead of answering the same question ten times over the course of a month for ten different people, I just send the Gem and say "here's everything, ask it." Perfect for technical documentation when someone asks about a feature. Research is solid too.

Granola is the one I genuinely could not do my job without. Three years ago I sat down with other product people and said: I keep losing my meeting notes. Sometimes they're in my email, sometimes in OneNote, sometimes I forgot to record the call entirely. Then when I need to reference something, I'm digging through hundreds of files trying to find the right one. Granola fixes all of that. Every call, auto-captured, searchable, with context about who was in the meeting. It's freaking sweet.

Wispr Flow makes me feel like a wizard. I have a microphone right next to my desk and I barely type anymore. I talk everything on my home computer. Coding with my voice is incredible. Once you get used to it, typing feels like going back to a flip phone.