I try a lot of AI tools. Most of them last about a day. These five stuck around because they do a real job in my week: scheduling posts, dictating, building apps, and finding work. Nothing here is sponsored. If one of them stops working, I'll drop it and write about whatever replaces it.
1. Buffer
I set this one up this week to run the social accounts for my apps. The free plan covers three channels, and it auto-publishes TikTok videos and photo posts, with ten posts queued per channel at a time.
The reason it stuck: TikTok kept demanding an emailed code on every single browser login, so managing the account that way was unworkable. Buffer just posts. The free plan caps at three channels, so I have the two TikTok accounts and the PocketMacro Instagram on it, and that's the whole setup.
2. OpenWhispr
A dictation app for the Mac, with the model running locally. Free, no subscription, and the audio never leaves the machine.
I use it daily now to talk instead of type, for notes, messages, and rough drafts. It is the one tool in this list that saves me effort every single day without me thinking about it, which is probably why it stuck.
3. Muse Code
Meta's AI coding agent, on the five dollar plan. I field tested it in October and I'm using it for my solo hackathon build, a camera math game called Toybox Math.
It drafts alongside the other tools I use, and I pick from the options. The price is the point: five dollars is cheap enough to keep around for a single project without thinking about it.
4. Scrapling
A Python scraping framework I use for the RFP radar I run for my day job. Some bid pages only render in a browser, and Scrapling's stealth session rendered the Abilene, Texas bids page on my Mac when a plain fetch couldn't read it.
It is slow, around thirty seconds a page, so it fits a handful of tricky pages, not bulk crawling. That is the honest limit, and inside that limit it works.
5. The drafting rotation: Grok, OpenCode, Codex, and Claude
This one is a workflow, not a single app. When I need something drafted, whether it's code, a ticket, or a post, I give the same task to a few of them and pick the best result.
OpenCode is the one I love for trying new models with one consistent setup. Grok comes bundled with Cursor under one subscription. Claude does the deep repo work. They each have a lane, and I keep all of them around because none of them wins every time.
That's the list. Five tools, all still installed, all still earning their spot.
