The tools I actually use.
The few doing the real work right now, plus what's coming next.
The stack
My everything. Thinking, planning, writing, copy, social graphics, fact-checking, quality control. This whole brand runs on Claude. The site you're reading, every word and every line behind it, came from working with one AI tool. Not a stack of ten.
The bridge between my brain and Claude. I talk out a thought, it cleans up the transcript, I paste it straight in. Talking is faster than typing. When you use one AI tool for everything, the speed of getting your thoughts into it matters most. Underrated.
Where my AI Second Brain lives. Every note, research file, and draft sits in one vault on my Desktop. Plain markdown I own forever, backed up to a private repo. Claude reads from this vault and gets caught up in seconds. Without it, I'd re-explain context every session.
The email platform powering the newsletter. I've trusted it for years on my other businesses. Strong automation builder. Not the prettiest out of the box, but it does the job. Every signup form on this site flows through it.
YouTube keyword and competitor research. It shows me what people actually search for and which videos are punching above their weight, so I pick topics with real demand instead of guessing. It points the camera before I turn it on. The difference between making videos and making videos people find.
Video editing by editing text. I record, it writes the transcript, and I cut the dead air and the umms by deleting words on the page. It turns editing from wrestling a timeline into fixing a doc. The piece that makes publishing video as one person actually doable.