The Toolshed
An honest board. What's in daily use, what's on trial, what I retired.
№
Tool
Category
Status
Added
Note
№38
Canva AI
Media Generation
IN USE
JAN 26
Best For - Social media graphics - Quick design work - Non-designers - Brand consistency My Verdict: The AI f…
№37
ChatGPT
AI Assistants
IN USE
JAN 26
Best For - General Q&A and quick research - Image generation (DALL-E built in) - Plugin ecosystem for special…
№36
Claude
AI Assistants
IN USE
JAN 26
What It Does Claude is Anthropic's frontier AI assistant. It handles complex analysis, nuanced writing, codin…
№35
Claude Code
Coding & Development
IN USE
JAN 26
What It Does Agentic coding tool that lives in your terminal. Reads your entire codebase, makes multi-file ch…
№34
Confluence
Product & Design Ops
IN USE
APR 26
Structured team wiki that pairs with Jira for product documentation and decision logs.
№33
Figma
Product & Design Ops
IN USE
APR 26
Browser-based design tool for UI, wireframes, and prototypes. Real-time collaboration built in.
№32
Forgejo
Coding & Development
IN USE
APR 26
Open-source, community-led Git hosting. Lightweight alternative to GitLab and Gitea.
№31
Gemini
AI Assistants
IN USE
JAN 26
Best For - Gmail drafting and summarization - Google Docs assistance - Search-integrated research - Google Wo…
№30
Google Analytics
Product & Design Ops
IN USE
APR 26
Measure site and app traffic, conversion, and user behavior. The default analytics stack for most teams.
№29
Google Workspace
Productivity & Docs
IN USE
APR 26
The stack I actually use for mail, calendar, and lightweight docs.
№28
Jira
Product & Design Ops
IN USE
APR 26
Atlassian tool for tracking work, managing backlogs, and running agile teams at scale.
№27
Lovable
Coding & Development
IN USE
JAN 26
Best For - Non-technical founders building MVPs - Rapid prototyping with Supabase backend - Landing pages and…
№26
Microsoft Teams
Comms & Meetings
IN USE
APR 26
Microsoft platform for chat, video meetings, and collaborative document editing.
№25
Obsidian
Comms & Meetings
IN USE
APR 26
Markdown notes with backlinks and a graph view. Files stay on your disk.
№24
Outlook
Productivity & Docs
IN USE
APR 26
Work mail and calendar at DT scale. Occasionally fights back.
№23
Perplexity
AI Assistants
IN USE
JAN 26
Best For - Research with source verification - Current events and news synthesis - Competitive intelligence -…
№22
Plaud
Comms & Meetings
IN USE
APR 26
AI voice recorder that turns meetings into transcripts, summaries, and action items
№21
Slack
Comms & Meetings
IN USE
APR 26
Real-time team communication organized by channels, threads, and DMs.
№20
Codex
Coding & Development
IN ROTATION
JAN 26
What It Does OpenAI's cloud-based agentic coding environment. Runs tasks in isolated sandboxes, handles multi…
№19
DeepSeek
AI Assistants
IN ROTATION
JAN 26
What It Does Open-source reasoning model from China that rivals frontier Western models at a fraction of the …