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

Here is my 5:

1. Claude - solo building my little product with it!

2. Linear - best jira alternative even for solo 🚀

3. Zed - fast and light, if terminal is not enough for you but you won't stick to VS code or something 😅

4. Slack - just love it

5. Whisperly.io - my little product, mac os menubar: wispr flow-like TTS but with little killer feature - translate mode. I'm not an English native speaker, so it's more like " I'm just solving my own pain " product 🤘

1. Claude

2. Figma

3. n8n

   I dont think I need 5 if you are very deep into these 3

My 5:

1. VS Code

2. Loom

3. Google Sheet (I have replaced so many other tools but just plain google sheet now)

4. Apple Calendar & Reminder

5. Google Drive

After trying at least dozens of tools for a decade, I settled for the most simple ones and realised that if you have a process in mind and have already figured out which flow works for you then all you need is a flexible tool to achieve "your specific flow" instead of being forced to follow what the tool dictates. But again tools like Notion, Things, Linear etc are amazing to start and when you don't want philosophic friction and just move forward.

my 5 tools keeping my sanity intact as an indie developer:

1. Next.js – My absolute go-to for spinning up fast, SEO-friendly landing pages and web apps in no time.

2. Whop – Saved me weeks of custom development. It handles all our user licensing, subscriptions, and billing effortlessly.

3. OpenAI – Powers the background reasoning and quick API calls for my projects.

4. Docker – Keeps my development environments completely consistent and portable, whether I'm working locally or deploying.

5. Gmail – Just like you, it's my ultimate hub for quick notes, reminders, and user feedback loops.

And a bonus #6 that I'm launching right now:

LeadSniper Pro (getleadsniper.com) – A Chrome sidebar extension I built to automate Reddit keyword monitoring and AI replies, so I don't have to spend hours manually searching for leads.

Building in public is a trip! What was the hardest part of transitioning from building minimalist phone to launching SafeLimit?

1. Claude / ChatGPT - brainstorming and coding

2. Obsidian - notes notes notes

3. Basic Memory - I like to use this so my LLMs have persistent context.

4. Gmail - email is still email

5. Spotify - sometimes music just makes the hard parts easier

My 5 are:

1. Cursor - still find that if you are specific about design and want control over experience, this is the coding agent I can't live without

2. HTML.to.design plug in for Figma. Really nice to not start from scratch in terms of design. Also these days, I go to cursor first and use this plug in to pull the design into figma.

3. Loom - product demos

4. Google Cloud - Overall, all their APIs are so easy to set up and plug into. Vision API is great.

5. Dovetail - the best for user interview synthesis. The "chat with your project" feature is perfection. no notes.

Mine are all research and knowledge-work tools:

Zotero — captures every paper and PDF, still the backbone of my reference library.

NotebookLM — I dump sources in and interrogate them; it genuinely changed how I read.

Obsidian — where notes actually live long-term, linked and searchable.

Readwise — pulls highlights out of everything so they resurface later instead of dying in a PDF.

Claude — thinking partner for drafting, summarising, and untangling messy ideas.

Funny thing is NotebookLM is the one I lean on hardest but also the one that frustrates me most day to day — enough that I've started building a small workspace layer on top of it to smooth out source-capturing and prompting. Curious if anyone else here has a tool they love but keep wishing worked slightly differently?

Genuinely couldn't work without these 5 — they're basically one pipeline for me:

1. Claude and codex — my thinking + building partner. Design calls, code, reviews, drafting. It does

the heavy lifting so I stay at the deciding level.

2. cmux — where I run everything in parallel without losing the thread. Multiple workstreams at once, one place to

steer them.

3. Telegram — my comms + alerts hub. Bots, notifications, quick coordination — the nervous system tying the rest

together.

4. Typeless — I talk, it types. Capturing ideas at the speed I think them instead of the speed I type is a real

unlock.

5. Plainlist — honestly, I built it because my ADHD was winning. Distracted, thread lost, goals forgotten by lunch.

It's just plain text, but it plans the day, keeps my goals visible, and drops me into Focus mode when everything

gets loud. Whole workload in one file — and unlike every app I'd tried, it doesn't add to the noise.

Capture (Typeless) → think + build (Claude + cmux) → coordinate (Telegram) → run the day (Plainlist). That loop is

my operation.

My 5 tools:

Claude / ChatGPT – research, first drafts, and thinking through problems out loud

Apollo – prospecting and outreach, saves a ton of manual sourcing time

Perplexity – quick fact-checking and market/company research without digging through 10 tabs

Notion – my second brain, notes, project tracking, all in one place

Slack – can't imagine being in a team without it at this point

• Claude. Does most of the actual work. Prompts, code, copy, research. I build tools with it, not just chat with it. The Chrome MCP alone replaced a sourcing headcount.

• ChatGPT. Second opinion machine. When Claude's output feels too clean, I run it here to see what a different model catches.

• Wispr Flow. I stopped typing. Talking is 4x faster and my prompts got better the second they stopped being something I had to type out.

• HubSpot. Deal flow dies without a system. It's not exciting. It's the difference between a pipeline and a pile of business cards.

• Canva. Every deck, every event graphic, every post. Speed beats polish and Canva is the only thing that lets me ship both.