Not a list of 47 tools. Just the ones I actually kept using.
There's a genre of content online that I find useless: "X AI tools that will 10x your productivity." Usually written by someone who tried each tool for 20 minutes, added a screenshot, and called it a review. This isn't that. These are tools I actually opened again the next day. And the day after.
Claude
I use it every day. Not just for generating stuff — though sometimes that — but mostly for thinking. When I'm stuck on how to frame a problem, I talk it through with Claude. When I need to write something and I'm staring at a blank doc, I start there. When I'm working through a design decision and I need someone to push back, it pushes back.
The thing that made it stick: it doesn't just answer the question you asked. It answers the question you should have asked. That's rare, even among people.
Figma AI
Honestly, less useful than I expected. The auto-layout suggestions are occasionally good. The rename layers feature is fine. But I'm not using it to generate designs — I tried that and it's not there yet. What I do use is quick annotation and alt-text generation for accessibility reviews.
The bar for "useful" in a tool I'm already in eight hours a day is high.
v0 and similar
Useful for prototyping ideas quickly when I want to show something that looks real without spending four hours in Figma. Especially good for showing stakeholders "this is roughly what it would feel like" without committing to specifics.
The catch: you spend 90% of the time fixing the output. So it only makes sense for throwaway explorations — not anything you're actually shipping.
The tools that stuck are the ones that made existing parts of my work faster, not the ones trying to do the work for me. I still do the design. I still make the decisions. The AI handles the parts that used to just be friction.
That's it.