Everyone keeps asking what tools I actually use day-to-day. Not the ones I test. Not the ones I demo. The ones that are open on my screen right now. Here it is.
Writing: Claude
Claude is my main writing tool, full stop. But what makes it genuinely powerful isn’t the model itself: it’s the custom skills and memory layer on top. I’ve trained it on how I write: my sentence structure, my tone, the way I open a piece, how I close one. It doesn’t sound like a robot trying to imitate me. It sounds like me on a good day.
With custom skills, you can turn Claude into a specialist. A copywriter who knows your brand guidelines. A strategist who knows your frameworks. An editor who knows what you hate. Once that’s set up, the output quality jumps by a factor of ten compared to just prompting a vanilla model.
Learning: NotebookLM
Whenever I need to get up to speed on something fast, I go to NotebookLM. You drop in sources: PDFs, articles, research papers, YouTube transcripts, whatever, and it builds a knowledge base you can actually talk to. Ask it questions, pull out key ideas, and connect dots across multiple documents at once.
The feature that changed how I learn is the podcast generation. You upload your research, and it generates a conversation between two hosts as they walk through everything you just fed it. I listen while I walk, while I drive, while I cook. That’s the difference between reading something and actually absorbing it.
Coding: Claude Code + Claude Cowork
For coding, it’s Claude Code, all day. It runs in your terminal, understands your entire codebase, and can build, edit, debug and refactor across files. It’s not a chatbot you paste code into. It’s an agent that works inside your project like a developer who has read every file.
Then there’s Claude Cowork for building full apps: no terminal required. I built three apps while on the treadmill doing cardio. You describe what you want, you build it, and you iterate. The bar for shipping something useful has dropped completely. You don’t need to know how to code. You need to know what you want to build.
Research: Grok
When I’m doing serious research: where the world is heading, what’s shifting in an industry, what people are actually saying right now: I use Grok. The reason is simple: it has access to X (formerly Twitter). That means real-time signal from founders, researchers, operators, and people closest to whatever is happening. No other model has that. For trend research and forward-looking analysis, you genuinely cannot beat it.
Automations: Manus
For quick automations, I use Manus. It’s an AI agent that can browse the web, use tools, and complete multi-step tasks on your behalf. The key thing I always tell people: stay in the tool and let it finish the whole task. Don’t jump in halfway. Don’t interrupt it. Give it the goal, give it the context, then let it run. That’s when it actually delivers.
That’s the stack. Claude for writing and coding, NotebookLM for learning, Grok for research, and Manus for automation. Each one does something the others don’t. Together, they cover most of what I need to build and think clearly in 2026.
