Which AI tools have you actually kept using 6 months later?
The AI tool graveyard in my dock is embarrassing. I've downloaded and abandoned more "game-changer" tools in the last year than in the previous five combined.
But a few have genuinely stuck. The ones I still use daily without thinking about it:
Claude for anything that needs actual reasoning or long context
- Cursor for coding - it's changed how I write code, not just sped it up
- Perplexity for research that I'd previously just Google-and-pray
Everything else I tried for a week, got excited about, then quietly uninstalled.
What I've noticed: the tools that stuck are the ones that replaced something I was already doing, not the ones that asked me to build new habits. The "you should also do X now with AI" tools rarely survive. The "you already do X, here's a faster way" tools do.
Curious what's actually survived the hype cycle for you - and whether you've noticed any pattern in what makes something sticky vs. something you drop after a week.
Replies
I’ve noticed the same pattern.
The AI tools that survived for me are ChatGPT, Codex, Claude Code, Cursor, and NotebookLM. They replaced work I was already doing every day coding, debugging, research, and understanding large codebases or documents.
The ones I stopped using were mostly "nice to have" tools that required changing my workflow instead of improving it. If an AI tool doesn't save me time within the first few days, it usually doesn't make it into my daily stack.
WebCurate.co
I still use the traditional AI's, ChatGPT and DeepSeek :)
Frankly speaking, no tool has survived the 6-month time window for me. I was very tempted to say Claude Code, which seems to last a bit longer than the previous ones, but not really there yet.