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

Mine include:

1. Claude code - not just for coding; it's basically my second brain for content, systems and pulling apart problems before I touch anything. Great for troubleshooting and bug fixing.

2. Dashlane - can't function without it. One master password and everything else just autofills, saving me constant password resets. Doubles as my vault for env vars and api keys.

3. Vercel/Supabase - the backbone for anything I build now, from internal tools to client-facing stuff.

4. Loops - handles all the email side without the usual drip-campaign faff, genuinely simple to set up compared to some of the bigger platforms.

5. Clip - built this one myself because for years I have been annoyed at not being able to find screenshots and downloads instantly and drag them where I need them. Clip is a floating tray on Windows that captures screenshots and downloads them the second they happen, so nothing gets lost while hunting through folders. Small thing, but I use it constantly and would now be lost without it.

Bonus one - Lemon Squeezy for handling payments but sat in merchant verification for longer than I'd like. Assuming it clears, I'm expecting it to handle payments and licensing for Clip without me having to build any of that myself. Really impressed in testing, just need the go live as people waiting to buy.

Interested in seeing the non-obvious ones that solve life's little tech-based niggles.

for me it will be as :

1. Ghostusd - as I am crypto guy, and this is my platform, i use this to swap across any chains without exposing my transaction as publicly

2. Claude : it for code and research

3. X : to post the things and get connected.

4. telegram : i like telegram more than the whatsapp for chatting :)

5. VS Code : i do code .

For me:

VS Code — where most of the actual building happens.
GitHub — source control, reviews, history, and keeping a large project organised.
ChatGPT — architecture discussions, implementation support, testing ideas, security reviews, and documentation.
Docker — keeping development and production environments reproducible.
Browser DevTools — debugging frontend behaviour, requests, performance, and responsive layouts.

The interesting change for me is that AI has moved from being an occasional brainstorming tool to becoming part of the everyday engineering workflow.

Mine's a short list: FounderFlow (my own tool, I check it before anything else since it tells me what actually needs me across my businesses that day), a shared calendar, Slack, a plain notes app for stuff that doesn't fit anywhere else, and coffee. Everything else on that list is negotiable, the first one stopped being optional a while ago.

For building Lernex and the Metis-1.6 model work, my five right now are:

1. GitHub — the source of truth across product, model, and infrastructure work.

2. Codex — implementation, debugging, and turning a large product backlog into shipped changes.

3. Supabase — learner accounts, persistent state, usage data, and the feedback loop behind personalization.

4. Vercel — deployment plus the visibility to see where real sessions slow down or fail.

5. Figma — keeping a large learning product coherent as new lesson, practice, visual, and mobile surfaces are added.

The valuable part is the loop between them: observe a learner’s behavior, identify the product or model failure, change it, evaluate it, and ship again. Any one tool can be replaced; losing that loop would hurt much more.

my top 5:
1. Claude Code - code review, front end development, seo
2. ChatGPT - brainstorming

3. Utilitly - website I built for PDF editing & processing (Acrobat sucks and is expensive and smallpdf/ilovepdf is no better lol)

4. Gemini - research

5. Vercel - deployment

It honestly depends especially when it comes to LLMs. chatgpt is good for brainstorming and blog topic writing but I find it lacks the coding capabilities of Claude (tho i'm not sure if 5.6 sol solves this because i haven't used it yet)

1. Claude - brainstorming, drafting, planning, creating.

2. Notion to capture everything.

3. Vercel - to host all my projects

4. VSCode of course

5. Supabase - of late trying out neonDB

Lovable for rapid prototyping, ChatGPT and co- pilot for planning.

Feedbacks here are fascinating, I’m always curious what tools other founders lean on to stay fast and creative, interesting reads so far, cool!

1. Codex

2. Claude

3. VScode

4. Chrome

5. Chatgpt for plans

Here's my five:

• Research tool - Claude / chatgpt / Gemini/ Perplexity

• Note tools - Notion is my top pick, Obsidian note is good too

• Slack - the new Slackbot function, especially if connected with the internal knowledge base, is seriously underestimated. It's extremely useful to backtrace any past conversation, summarize updates, locate key documentations, etc. Sorry but other chat tools like Teams/Discord are just not compatible.

• Design tools - Figma or Canva

• Meeting tools - Zoom's AI note is pretty good, Google Meet is fine, never used Granola since it feels like an extra step.