Ask HN: What useful AI tools do you use every day?

Something never thought I would say: google AI previews. They actually helped me a lot during Iran's internet shutdown last week. I wrote a blog post about it: https://ahrm.github.io/jekyll/update/2025/06/20/iran-interne... .

Deepl Write. It helps me improve my lousy German by showing me a better way to write what I came up with.

Google Lens to identify plants.

BirdNet is Shazam for birds.

ChatGPT for vague questions about everything. I feel like a child asking mom about the world again. It reduced the friction of curiosity.

It’s pretty wild that I have a real world Pokedex.

Current workflow that might stick:

I’m using SuperWhisper for voice dictation and casually chatting with Claude Code, which I just start in the Obsidian vault directory.

I’m currently onboarding into a new project and need to gather and structure information quickly. So I just jot down whatever comes to mind — in natural language, no structure.

Claude takes care of organizing it: generating #tags, creating [[links]], and making things retrievable later.

After a couple of weeks, I can ask things like:

• What did I do yesterday?

• Who is “John Doe”?

• Which project uses Java version 21?

• …

Happy to share more if anyone’s curious.

(English reviewed with a bit of help from ChatGPT — non-native speaker here.)

NotebookLLM. Load in technical manuals and datasheets, then ask it questions and check the parts it references instead of searching tens of thousands of pages across dozens of diferrent documents. It's the most useful AI tool I've tried so far for embedded work.

1. ChatGPT I use it mostly to dump quick ideas and then expand them later by using it as my thinking partner. Also I use chatgpt for brainstorming ideas for marketing campaigns, writing copies etc. I have few custom GPTs created for my every use case

2. Claude I use Claude projects for writing articles and for SEO optimisation

3. Cursor I use Cursor for coding daily. Now quite used to the flow it creates and makes my coding super fast

4. Sora and Gemini For image generation. Mostly I need that to share social media posts

All other AI tools come and go but these are 4 constants for me for last few months.

I have an actual rubber duck on my desk, which means I only use AÍ for stuff like “refactor and write tests for this stuff Ducky and I designed”.

But I think your question is fundamentally flawed—-we all use AI in phone and editor autocomplete, searching, summarization and whatnot on a daily basis now in office tools. It is using it for actual useful output that counts, and for that it is still below what I deem acceptable.

- postgress/pgvector and ollama in a jupyter notebooks[1] to search my documents/projects and other data

- Mistral as search engine and for natural language processing (mostly summaries of something)

- Co-Pilot, mostly as autocomplete and sometimes to ask questions or let it write tests or do refactoring

- AWS AI Services to create tasks, tickets and stories from templates in JIRA or YouTrack.

- Github/Co-Pilot and Gitlab/snyk for code review and security analysis in PRs

[1] basically https://github.com/roskakori/wolkenlose-ki-fuer-zu-hause/tre... and now i try also https://github.com/ggozad/haiku.rag

Claude Code. It's so amazing, and not just for code. You can use it for pretty much all kinds of projects. See, for example, this post of a user sharing his automated workflow https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1liylon/were_unde...

Perplexity - for search (Google replacement), summarization and rewriting, basic research and making presentations (using Perplexity apps)

Granola - transcription and meeting notes, searching across notes, recalling action items

I've played around extensively with ChatGPT, but Perplexity now covers my use cases. I'm looking to test Claude, primarily because Perplexity does not currently support MCP servers, and I need an assistant who can answer questions across all my work files (Google Drives, Calendar, Slack messages, GitHub, etc.).

None that has come with the flood of LLM-based tools. I only use one language translator [1], but it was already of such good quality before the LLM wave that I didn't even notice the change under the bonnet (if there was one at all).

[1] https://www.deepl.com/en/translator

I'm not the most versant AI user so far, I was wondering, what is currently the best tool for asking math questions (lessons, proofs, examples) ?

Travelling with ChatGPT is incredible. Translate this Japanese menu into romaji (latin character Japanese) and English. Explain the difference between Turkish yoghurt dishes haydari and cacik. Walking around Manila with voice mode talking me through some basic Tagalog phrases I might need.

Wow it’s amazing how hacker news which is primarily filled with technology type people has no few using ai or has no idea what they are doing with ai.

The saying "Can't see the forest for the trees" really makes a lot of sense now.

I have my own personal digital assistant in the form of a telegram bot. Why telegram? Because it is in a group with me, my wife, and the bot. It manages our calendars, reminders, shopping list, and a few other things. When we think of something that might be useful, I add it. It's been great, and because it's on telegram, my wife uses it without issues.

For features: Transcript of a Zoom call, ask the LLM what you could do better, how you might be perceived, what the LLM thinks you wanted to achieve (vs. what you really wanted to achieve) etc. Gave me great insights and helps me every day.

Self-marketing: Started Marvai this week https://github.com/StephanSchmidt/marvai/ as an AI tool for installing useful Claude Code prompts

None.

Very rarely I need a bash script or systemd service written from a command line, or just something where I know what to search for and what to replace it with.

Then I use Co-Pilot.

The Jetbrains code helper AI is 99% useless, also inconsistent.

Augment Code (https://www.augmentcode.com/) extension in VSCode. The remote agent feature is fantastic and the local agent is worth buying credits for. I've tried almost every AI editor (Cursor, Windsurf, Roo/Cline etc.), tried CLI-based coders (Claude Code, Aider, Codex etc.), and have used them all with ton of useful MCPs and in the end, I've had the best results with Augment.

Claude.ai + Claude Code + Overlay(https://overlay.one) The last one is built by me, a tool to interact with websites.

Robot vacuum is the most useful for sure.

there are a lot of mixed reviews on this tool but chatgpt still is one of my most used ai tools - from work to personal life.

i find it helpful to sort of help me make sense of things when i have lots of ideas and unable to structure it

I've even used it for emergencies - trying to locate a place while visiting another city and both maps and the place's insta guide failed .. it was pouring down there. (maybe that's why im partial lol)

i have also started enjoying notebooklm for contextual content generation

gemini - ive tried but it keeps disappointing. currently exploring perplexity

None day to day.

I may use a tool time to time, but I do not use anything daily (on purpose at least, as all software nowadays has AI running in the background that I do not care for).

claude code for writing code, chatGPT for everything else (brainstorm ideas or writing down documentation) and Cringe Guard (https://github.com/pankajtanwarbanna/cringe-guard - i've built this one to avoid cringe content on my feed)

Other than the obvious heavyweights, here are a few others:

1. notebooklm for deep-dive into any document

2. Notion AI for QA on my own documents (works really well)

3. cartesia.ai for very good and cheap audio generation

4. veed.io for automated shorts generation with voiceovers and background imagery

5. zenquery.app for data analysis on my large csv and json files

6. regrowth.so for building my own brand on twitter by copying others

7. syft.ai for news summaries (actually works)

i find grok far superior to chatgpt and copilot, but none of them worth more than $10/m. I am about to switch to agents and pro subscription level because I've heard good feedback about those. AI is perfect at small and easy tasks

VSCode with Copilot using Claude Sonnet 4 as the model, running in Agent mode.

These replies would be more useful if they included the subscription(s) cost.

I’m learning German, and my listening comprehension particularly needs work. So I create mini stories on different topics using Claude, then ElevenLabs to do narration.

My company has a specific format for weekly updates, and, frankly, it's a pain to put together.

So what I do is I take notes in a doc throughout the week (Obsidian periodic weekly notes) and just send all of it to a custom GPT that creates the update for me. I usually then spend ~10 minutes cleaning it up.

I'm generally allergic to having an LLM write for me, but seeing as it _must_ be in the requested template and ChatGPT saves me a couple of hours, I let this case slide.

Surprisingly, many people in this thread use no AI tools at all...

Tabs open right now: Chatgpt, claude, and grok.

Local LLM: deepseek r1 and qwen2.5coder; phi4 for my project.

Pycharm pro as my main IDE. I <3 pycharm.

I have been giving Void IDE a try this week but it's just frustrating me more than anything.

Has to be a bug where when i approve it to edit the file and it reads maybe 5 lines, stops, still says its running but isnt doing anything. then the chat keeps going like an error happened; but then it really errors out. I'm not ruling out that im just screwing it up somewhere.

duck.ai

Duckduckgo's llm offering with no sign in required and more privacy.

Warp.dev and VSCode Copilot (I use Cursor et al too it could be any of them).

Warp because I can't remember many commands (copilot in the terminal works too but you lose agent mode). They've just release v2 today, looking forwards to try it as a free Claude Code.

Looking to switch to Dia or some agentic browser as main driver but at the moment content with Firefox and Grok as the default search engine.

I use Google Gemini. Can't say it's super useful but it's only $15/month so worth trying. It's better than search for coding things, the image and video generation is cool for memes I guess. The code it produces is mostly useless but it's ok with concepts.

Goblin.tools

cursor ofcourse, the tool I’ve paid most in my career

Amp aka https://AmpCode.com. I’m one of the core engineers building it - happy to answer any questions. We built Amp with Amp. So I guess I rely on Amp ;)

My own AI agents platform, AI Construx (https://aiconstrux.com). The MVP should be released in a few weeks time.