What are the 5 tools you simply couldn't do your work without?
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):
Grammarly – proofreading my texts, not just posts, but also client communication
ChatGPT / Claude – mostly brainstorming, help with copy, and summarising
Figma – I can put the basic graphics together quickly.
Translator – sounds incredibly old-school, but English is not my mother tongue
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 – SafeLimit – prevents me from being banned on LinkedIn, so I will not lose my account.]
What are your five?
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1. Claude Code
2. Claude Code
3. Claude Code
4. Claude Code
5. Claude Code
I use it for everything. I ask "can we do this?" and it says "yes boss, we can do it" thanks claude I love u
@mikbal 😂
As a solo founder, mine are:
Supabase — backend that just works, saved me from burning out on infra
Claude Code — ships features in hours, basically my co-founder
Raycast — I open it 200 times a day without thinking
Resend — transactional emails that actually land in inbox
Fluxr — I track 250+ news sources daily, built this one myself because nothing else fit
What's the one you'd drop last if you had to cut four?
Most mentioned seemed paid.
Grammarly: never really needed it. I write. have other ways for same purpose.
Figma: No. What you use figma for?
Currently I am using:
Todo: By microsoft. Really Great. For almost anything. (As of August 8, 2026 IST)
(The reason I clicked on this post to mention it here).
my 5. but not the ones you would guess.
quiet. the first hour of the day with no notifications is the most productive tool i own.
saying no. i track how many i say per week. under 3 means i overcommitted.
long walks. every hard product decision i made this year got clearer on a walk.
one honest reader. someone who will tell me the copy is bad without softening it.
a running doc of things ive been wrong about. keeps ego small and iteration honest.
none of these have a logo. all of them beat the ones that do.
@thenameisarian The "wrong about" doc is the one that got me. I've never seen anyone frame it that way but it's exactly what separates people who iterate from people who just ship and move on. How long have you been keeping it and do you ever go back and read old entries?
I will skip the obvious four and give the one that is unusual.
A page that asks people what they would pay, before the thing exists. It is the only item in my stack whose job is to stop me building something. Everything else on a list like this helps you ship faster. Almost nothing helps you decide whether to ship at all.
That one is https://blunlock.com, and I build it.
Claude is in daily stack but git diff is tool I cannot work without. Caught agent making failing test pass by weakening assertion instead of "fixing" underlying code. suite stayed green for days )
Softorino 💻📲
My 5, as a marketer at a small Mac software company: Figma (all our banners & launch assets live there), Slack (the office, basically), Jira (my to-do list wearing a tie), Claude (drafts, research & half my ops lately), and Telegram – where all the real conversations with Ukrainian tech folks happen 😄 Also +1 to your translator point – English isn't my mother tongue either, and the invisible 6th tool is the UA/EN switch in my head running 40 times a day.
One tool I keep coming back to is a boring one: a single pet record. I’m building Petio, and the biggest insight has been that owners do not need another dashboard. They need the right detail at the right moment. Petio connects food checks, reminders, notes, and documents to one pet profile. The tools that stick are usually the ones that remove one repeated reconstruction task.
My five are probably:
GitHub - code, issues, reviews, discussions, and increasingly the center of almost everything we build.
ChatGPT / Claude - research, challenging assumptions, writing, debugging, and thinking through problems faster.
Ailin¹ - our own collective intelligence stack. I use it when I want multiple models and perspectives working on the same problem instead of relying on a single answer.
Figma - turning rough ideas into something visual enough to discuss and iterate on.
Terminal + Codex - probably where I spend the most time when actually building.
The interesting shift for me is that AI stopped being “one tool” in the stack. It’s gradually becoming a layer across almost every other tool I use.
Nice! do you use google translate or do you find there is a more accurate tool out there? i'm always on Figma, Lovable, Claude