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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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For me, it's Claude, Figma, Antigravity, Docs, Slack, Notion, and Teams.

  1. VS Code

  2. Codex

  3. Figma

  4. Google Sheets

  5. Perplexity

Here are my 5:

  1. Linear – where our eng team spots issues before they blow up. Keeps us moving, not stuck.

  2. Zoom – nothing special, but every call runs on it.

  3. Katalyst – the agent that works our sales pipeline so we don't drop leads.

  4. Katalyst Notetaker – sits in on calls, hands me the transcript + action items. Nothing slips.

  5. Claude – my go-to for getting work done and building mini-agents for daily work.

(PS- and the Notetaker are ours- we build them. So I'm a little biased, but they genuinely run my day.)


1/ chatgpt/gemini for brainstorming, refining grammar
2/ recurroster for managing my freelancing business all-in-one

Since travel is in my work, I'll add one more — Shaivio for AI trip planning. You describe where you want to go in plain language and it builds a full day-by-day itinerary with real flight, hotel, train options. Big time saver for trip research.

Obviously Claude Code

VS Code

Git : I use them for everything

Postman
Loom

fun thread. mine, as a solo dev building a health dashboard app:

  1. Flutter - one codebase for iOS + Android, and custom painters make chart-heavy UI genuinely fun to build

  2. Claude Code - went from fancy autocomplete to doing real chunks of the work, code review included

  3. Semgrep - had to pass Google's CASA security assessment to read health data, and static analysis caught things I never would have spotted myself

  4. GitHub Actions - the boring hero: analyze, tests and security scans on every PR so I can't merge something dumb at midnight

  5. Golden tests (Flutter's screenshot testing) - half tool, half safety net, but I couldn't touch a chart without them

also +1 on gmail as a reminder system, my drafts folder is basically a todo app at this point

i use: Figma, Claude Code / Fable5 , windsurf with Kimi 2.7 and mpc and more, Cursor, Google stich, chat gpt plus, codex and all of them worked together, because i build a agent that work with all of them in the same time. and they split the work for Prompting discuss and some more.

  1. Notion.

  2. Whispr Flow

  3. Claude

  4. Gmail

  5. Bluedot

solo builder, so my five do a lot of heavy lifting:

1. claude code, basically my engineering team at this point

2. fly.io, tiny vms that scale to zero, perfect for small services

3. neon, postgres i never have to babysit

4. resend, transactional email that just works

5. smolanalytics. full disclosure, this one is mine. i built it because i kept shipping blind: you ask your analytics questions in plain english from your editor and it answers with computed numbers, not hallucinated ones. it's open source, so calling it a tool i couldn't work without is at least honest

honorable mention: a paper notebook for everything no app has fixed yet. what's the most old-school thing on everyone's list?

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