Five tools. That's the whole stack.

I've tried dozens of AI tools. Five survived. Each one does something the others can't. One of them I've since had to give up, and I've left it in with the story attached rather than pretending it was never here.

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 best meeting-notes tool I have ever used, and as of this year I am not allowed to use it. It is not approved at my current company, so I moved to Notion and the Notion desktop app. I'm leaving this entry up with the note attached instead of quietly deleting it, because the recommendation is still true and the reason it left is the interesting part.

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 fixed all of that. Every call, auto-captured, searchable, with context about who was in the meeting. It's freaking sweet, and if your company allows it, use it.

Mine doesn't. That gap between the best tool and the allowed tool is where every product manager in a regulated industry actually lives, and almost nobody writes about it. The honest version of a tool stack includes the ones you had to give up.

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.