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What are the 5 tools you simply couldn't do your work without?

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This could be related to your industry, or even a side project you're working on.

Here are my 5 (I couldn't function without them):

  1. Grammarly – proofreading my texts, not just posts, but also client communication

  2. ChatGPT / Claude – mostly brainstorming, help with copy, and summarising

  3. Figma – I can put the basic graphics together quickly.

  4. Translator – sounds incredibly old-school, but English is not my mother tongue

  5. Gmail – and not only for communication, but also for storing ideas and sending myself email reminders for posts

[and soon one more that I am working on – – prevents me from being banned on LinkedIn, so I will not lose my account.]

What are your five?

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mine as a solo founder:

claude code, half my dev work at this point

posthog, free analytics that actually shows where visitors come from

google search console, the tool that told me google didnt even know my site existed. humbling

capcut, all my short video editing

and honestly reddit. best market research tool there is, people describe their problems here in their exact words. i steal phrasing for my copy all the time

Here are my five essentials as a product manager building AI products:

  1. ChatGPT – My go-to for brainstorming, writing, research, and debugging ideas.

  2. Figma – Where product ideas quickly turn into wireframes and polished prototypes.

  3. Notion – Keeps PRDs, roadmaps, meeting notes, and knowledge all in one place.

  4. Linear – Clean and fast for tracking issues, planning sprints, and staying aligned with engineering.

  5. Claude Code – Amazing for understanding large codebases and speeding up development with AI.

Curious to hear everyone else's top 5! 🚀

  1. Claude Code - needs no introduction

  2. Codex - again, no introduction needed

  3. Figma - the best design tool for me

  4. Gmail - well, I need to work with my clients so there's that

  5. Focus Terminal - my absolute favorite focus timer app!

  • brave

  • git

  • chatgpt/opencode

  • notepad

  • gmail

 Why do you prefer Brave over Chrome?

Mine would be -

  1. ChatGPT / Claude - coding, prototyping, brainstorming, research and sometimes, just general chit chat :)

  2. Google Docs / Sheets - probably where most of the actual work happens

  3. Loom / Kommodo - super useful for quick walkthroughs and feedback without another meeting

  4. OneNote - still where I dump rough ideas, notes and random thoughts

  5. ClickUp - keeps the team and all the moving pieces in one place

Have a few more though -- Discord, Gmail, Calendly, Snipping Tools, Go Full Page

 Have you also ried any other substitues for Loom? PS Gmail is pretty cool – I use it like reminders :D

At this point, this list feels pretty basic:

  1. ChatGPT / Claude

  2. Notion

  3. Canva

  4. Slack

  5. Google Calendar

 I have the same list (but swap Canva for Figma) :D

Mine, from the engineering side of a small startup:

  1. Claude Code, for most of what I ship. It writes, I review.

  2. GitHub, because the pull request is still where every decision actually gets made.

  3. Supabase, auth and Postgres without running either myself.

  4. Stripe, and its test mode more than the live one. Most of our payment bugs were found there, and one was not, which taught me more than the rest.

  5. Ovren, disclosure: I am one of the people building it. It takes the small requests from marketing and product, turns them into pull requests, and I review them like any other. It is on the list because it removed me as the bottleneck, which no other tool did.

The pattern I see in this thread is the same as ours: the AI tools stick when a human still approves the result. The ones that skip that step are the ones that get switched off.

Mine are
1. Vs code
2. Now even Claude code

  1. Docker

  2. Git and Github

  3. Postman

 Had you been using ChatGPT before? Why did you decide to go fully into Claude?

Mine are Claude, IFTTT, Google Sheets, Gmail and Buffer.

Claude is where most of my work starts now. I have about 20 MCP connectors set up, so it can read my docs, my inbox and our dashboards without me copying anything over.

IFTTT is the one I'm biased about, since I started it. It watches for the things I'd never remember to check. Some of my Applets save posts and articles to Google Sheets I labeled "for Claude," which is how Sheets made the list. It's the simplest way I've found to let AI see what happened while I wasn't looking.

Gmail and Buffer are less exciting. A scheduled task reads my Gmail every morning and tells me which few emails need a reply. Buffer lets me write posts in batches and stop thinking about when they go out.

Claude code
WisprFlow
Github
Cursor (any IDE)
Genie - yet to launch

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