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

Mine would be: ChatGPT, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, Screaming Frog, and Google Analytics. These are the tools I rely on daily for SEO research, technical audits, and tracking results.

For me: Notion, Google Workspace, LinkedIn, WhatsApp, and Canva. Simple stack, but gets everything done 💪

Curious what others can’t live without

Great question Nika, my top 5

1. Notion - Our team's and agent's workspace

2. Claude Code/ Lovable - Our agent developers

3. Github/ Cloudflare - Unmissable infrastructure

4. Money Magician - For managing our finances (but we might be biased ;) )

5. Google (cloud) - api's, authorization, AI, what not

Unpopular opinion after reading this whole thread: most of these stacks are quietly making us worse, not better.

Every tool listed here — and I mean every single one, all 500+ comments — is a production tool. Write faster, design faster, code faster, summarize faster. Zero tools for deciding what's worth making in the first place.

That's not a tooling gap. That's why everything online looks the same now. We gave everyone the same hands and nobody a better brain.

I spent 20 years in radio and TV, and old media knew this: the person who decides what goes on air is worth ten of the people producing it. The AI boom got that exactly backwards.

So honest question back at the thread: which of your 5 tools has ever told you 'don't make that'?

1. claude

2. chatgpt

3. flowshelf.app

4. and my mac 😁

Solo founder here so my picks are pretty boring and practical.

1. Claude Code. Most of my codebase went through it at some point.

2. DigitalOcean. The app and the database both live there and I almost never think about infra.

3. Stripe. Handles billing now, and Atlas was how I set up the company in the first place.

4. PostHog. Shows me what users actually do, which is never what I hoped.

5. Sentry. I usually know about errors before anyone gets around to reporting them.

A year ago none of these would have been an AI tool. Now one sits at the top of the list, which still feels a little strange.

Nice list. Here's my five:

1. VS Code - live in it all day, solo dev so it's a bit of everything

2. Figma - going solo kind of forced me to learn it, now I'm in it constantly

3. Claude - my brainstorming partner

4. Linear - keeps my planning from turning into a mess

5. Expo - lets me ship an iOS app solo without fighting native builds all day

They're actually not competing for the same job, which is why a lot of people run both:

• Grammarly catches surface-level stuff — grammar, tone, clarity — fast and inline as you type. It's a proofreader, not a collaborator.

• Claude/ChatGPT helps with the stuff before the sentence exists — brainstorming, structuring an argument, rewriting a paragraph that's technically correct but reads badly, summarizing a long doc. It's more of a thinking partner than a checker.

If you only had budget/attention for one: for polishing writing you've already drafted, Grammarly. For generating or restructuring content from scratch, an LLM. Most people doing both writing and thinking-through-problems end up wanting both, just for different stages.

Mine, running a software company, a care home, and a cafe at once: Gmail for everything, still, embarrassingly. Notion for anything that needs to outlive my memory. Calendly so scheduling isn't a full-time job. Grammarly for anything client-facing. And full disclosure since I built it, FounderFlow, which has become the thing that tells me which of the other four actually needs my attention today instead of me checking all of them manually every morning.

In my case!

I am using Claude, Cursor, AWS, these three all the days also Github