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

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This could be related to your industry, or even a side project you're working on.

Here are my 5 (I couldn't function without them):

  1. Grammarly – proofreading my texts, not just posts, but also client communication

  2. ChatGPT / Claude – mostly brainstorming, help with copy, and summarising

  3. Figma – I can put the basic graphics together quickly.

  4. Translator – sounds incredibly old-school, but English is not my mother tongue

  5. Gmail – and not only for communication, but also for storing ideas and sending myself email reminders for posts

[and soon one more that I am working on – – prevents me from being banned on LinkedIn, so I will not lose my account.]

What are your five?

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first five:

  • Cursor/OpenCode/ClaudeCode

  • Gmail

  • Obsidian

  • Youtube Music

  • nolainocr free tools for pdf merge and split

and second five (a little of "cheating"):

  • Kdenlive

  • OBS

  • CapCut

  • OneDrive

  • Antigravity

my 5:
1. Claude Code
2. Warp
3. Supabase
4. Vercel
5. Github

Mine are boring, and I think that's the point.

Claude Code — most of my actual building happens here now, not in an editor.

Obsidian — everything I'd otherwise forget. Plain markdown, so no tool can hold it hostage.

Fathom — records every call. I've since gone back through well over a hundred of them to dig up things I'd completely forgotten I said, which is a use case I absolutely did not buy it for.

Google Sheets — still undefeated for anything I need to reason about in rows.

Apollo — the go-to-market side of the company runs through it.

The thing I notice looking at that list: four of the five are places where things get stored, not places where work gets done. The tools I genuinely can't lose are the ones holding context. The ones producing output I've swapped constantly and barely noticed.

Here are my 5

1:Claude

2: Lovable

3: Magnific
4:Gmail

5:Adobe Suite (kind of cheating here)

Outside looking in:
Apple Notes

Cinema 4D

Sketchup

1. Claude / ChatGPT - talking through ideas, visualizing concepts, researching (though I am still mad that these tools ruined the emdash)

2. Slack / Zoom - communication with friends and colleagues

3. Canva / Figma - design (both me cobbling designs together and access the incredible designs my actual designer creates)

4. Little Bird - collecting context in the background so I can focus on the meeting instead of the notetaking

5. Google slides - I'm in marketing—everything lives in a deck

My top 5 are

  1. ChatGPT – Brainstorming, coding, writing, and debugging. It's become my everyday thinking partner.

  2. Claude – My go-to for long-form writing, product planning, and software architecture.

  3. Cursor – AI-powered coding that helps me build products much faster.

  4. Figma – For turning ideas into interfaces and refining the user experience before development.

  5. GitHub – Version control, collaboration, and shipping products with confidence.

The top ones for me these days are both, ChatGPT and Claude

  • ChatGPT is really great to discuss and bounce of ideas and work on creative stuff like logo visualization and mock ups but does tends to steer off topic quite often - guess it gets too excited! :)

  • Claude is more calm and collected and is my go to for 'serious' work, such as helping write code.

Hi Nika, here’s my top 5:

  • SprintGauge: My own service. I created it to be able to better analyze the work of my team over iterations on DevOps.

  • Azure DevOps: Pairs with SprintGauge for an optimal sprint management and analysis.

  • Claude/Gemini/ChatGPT: Daily partners for brainstorming, UI/UX design, architecture decisions, analisys and so on.

  • Toggl: Time tracking. My work days are so fractioned that without a start/stop timer it would be impossible to reconstruct what I did yesterday or the past days.

  • Obsidian: for notes and docs of every kind. Easy sync with my personal Google Drive, so I can carry my notes everywhere without being locked on subsriptions to third party services.

My five, as a solo dev:

Claude Code, which is most of my working day now rather than an assistant to it

Cloudflare Workers and D1, because a side project can go live for pennies and I never think about servers

Docker, purely so local matches production and I stop debugging the gap between them

Godot, for the game I build when I need to not think about invoices

A plain text context file per project that I keep current

That last one sounds like nothing and it's the one I'd miss most. It's the difference between an agent that helps and one that confidently guesses. Same reason your Gmail as idea storage entry rings true, the boring tool you actually maintain beats the clever one you don't.

  Good thread — I steal half my stack from these.

  Mine, as someone who builds Amazon affiliate / review sites:

  1. Claude — drafting, coding, and thinking out loud. Does most of the heavy lifting on both content and

  product work.

  2. Google Search Console — I basically live in it. For anything SEO, it's the only honest source of truth

  about what's actually happening vs. what I assume is happening.

  3. Ahrefs — keyword and competitor research. Picking the right niche and topics upfront saves more time than

  any amount of writing later.

  4. Amazon SiteStripe / Associates Central — not glamorous, but it's where the real affiliate links and

  category rate cards live. Half the job is just this.

  5. And the one I'm building, so I'm biased — usebravery, which sets up a done-for-you Amazon affiliate review

  site you own. Honestly started it because I was tired of doing steps 2–4 by hand for every new site.

  What's yours? Always curious what the SEO/affiliate folks here run vs. the general maker stack.

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