Andrew Baisden

Posted on Jan 10 • Edited on Dec 10

My Ultimate Toolkit - 10 AI Tools That Boost Productivity

#webdev #programming #ai #productivity

Updated for December 10th 2025 - New content, features and tools added

The tools you use improve the way you work. To me, productivity comes from creating a workflow with seamless systems that remove the friction, automate my repetitive tasks and free up time for me to actually do the work that matters.

AI has transformed that workflow. It makes research easier, decisions faster and writes code, visuals, and planning. With the right tools, you can accomplish more in less time, and it requires less bandwidth and fewer bottlenecks as the workload becomes lighter.

Taking all of this into account, here are 10 AI tools and platforms that consistently boost my productivity.

1. Perplexity

Perplexity is a conversational AI search engine and research assistant where you can find deep, accurate, fully-sourced answers. Rather than feeding you generic data, it processes the web in real time to bring together the best stories and knowledge about any topic, and not just a collection of links, but all your reference points as well, giving people an alternative to Google for fast knowledge they can trust.

Website ➡️ Perplexity

Why is it top tier 🔥

Perplexity has rapidly developed into one of the most advanced AI search engines in the world, and with their release of Comet, an innovative new AI-driven browser, they've transformed into a complete productivity ecosystem.

Comet isn’t just a browser; it feels like a personal AI teammate that runs in every tab. It can research with you, take notes for you in meetings, summarise pages, auto-organise tabs, draft emails and generate plans on your commands. You can multitask in the background, ask and browse questions as you work, or change LLMs based on the complexity of your job.

Since you can run your searches and tasks using the very best models, from Claude, OpenAI, and Grok, etc, with a subscription to Perplexity Pro, you can see that the platform is highly configurable.

Perplexity also features some of the industry's most powerful creative tools, including rendering support for image generation via GPT Image 1, Nano Banana, Seedream 4.0, and FLUX.1, allowing for a full visual workflow inside the platform.

Perplexity is no longer just "AI search." It’s becoming the operating system for curiosity and productivity, and one of the most capable AI assistants available today.

Some standout features include:

Comet Browser: A smarter browser for Mac, Windows, and Android with intelligent AI built in to help you curate your content faster and get things done without having to switch tools.
Comet Assistant in every tab: Ask questions, summarise articles, generate lists, your assistant learns your habits and follows your workflow.
Multi-LLM Search (Pro): Select Claude, ChatGPT, Sonar or Grok as your search and research engine.
AI Image Generation: Generate images with GPT Image 1, Nano Banana, Seedream 4.0, and FLUX.1

2. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is OpenAI’s flagship AI assistant based on the GPT-5.1 family of models. It is one of the most powerful and versatile AI tools that exists right now, capable of reasoning, coding, research and more importantly, multimedia generation, planning, rewriting ideas/brainstorming, all in a single interface.

Website ➡️ ChatGPT

Why is it top tier 🔥

ChatGPT is currently one of the strongest and most popular AI systems on the planet. With each subsequent generation, it gets smarter, more precise and more multimodal. The current GPT-5.1 models are good not only for deep reasoning and creative writing, but also for generating code, analysing data, deciphering images and using tools.

ChatGPT can create functional apps, scripts, documents, UIs and visualisations in a live canvas for you to interact with. With full-blown browsing, file uploads, voice conversations and even insane additional functionalities like image generation or Code Interpreter. This essentially makes it an all-in-one productivity engine built into a text chat.

Regardless if you’re coding, designing, developing marketing plans, researching, studying for exams or architecture and building entire apps, ChatGPT fits your workflow while providing high-quality results with the minimum of effort.

Some standout features include:

GPT-5.1 intelligence: It will render faster, more precise reasoning based on enhanced memory capacity, deeper context comprehension and stronger multistep planning.
Advanced image generation: Design anything you can imagine, including visual effects, animation, and virtual reality
Browsing with citations: ChatGPT can pull from the web, summarise sources, even compare answers and provide gold-standard citations.
Code the Translator/Data Analysis Pro: Upload CSVs, datasets, or even entire projects and have ChatGPT analyse, visualise, debug or refactor them.
Multimodal understanding: ChatGPT is capable of understanding images, screenshots, charts, PDFs, UI mocks, handwritten notes, etc.
Voice mode: Enjoy realistic, natural-sounding voice conversations (similar to a human assistant).
Developer-friendly extensions and tool calling: Use external APIs, bond workflows together or allow ChatGPT to utilise installed utilities to accomplish complicated functions.
Cross-platform availability: Use it on the desktop, mobile, browser extensions, VS Code extensions or use it within an app through OpenAI’s API.

3. Claude

Claude is Anthropic’s flagship AI assistant powered by the Claude 4.5 model family, with Opus 4.5 currently recognised as one of the most intelligent, safest, and most capable frontier models available. Renowned for its great reasoning capability, coding performance, and long-context consistency, Claude has truly become a favourite for developers, enterprises and researchers who want to have some deep, correct and reliable output from AI.

Website ➡️ Claude

Why is it top tier 🔥

Claude has quickly become the benchmark for complex reasoning, software development and long-form research. With the release of Claude Opus 4.5, the model reached state-of-the-art performance on SWE-bench Verified and other real-world coding benchmarks, beating every competing frontier model and even outperforming top human candidates on Anthropic’s own engineering tasks.

What sets Claude apart is its clarity of thought. It’s among the best models for juggling tasks, multi-step reasoning, system-level problem solving, debugging code, refactoring, architecture decisions, algorithmic work, and Agentic planning.

Claude is also deeply integrated into workflows via Claude Code, Claude for Chrome, and Claude for Excel, as well as Anthropic’s agent systems. These helpers enable Claude to work across your browser, local machine, spreadsheets and cloud environments in a reliable and accurate way.

Anthropic also recently purchased Bun, the hyper-fast JavaScript runtime, to turbo-charge Claude Code and build the future generation of AI-native developer infrastructure. Claude is more than an AI assistant; it’s growing into a true engineering partner.

Some standout features include:

Claude Opus 4.5, forward thinking and code-writing: Current state of the art in SWE-bench, multilingual coding tasks, agentic benchmarks and real-world software engineering.
Claude Code (now enterprise-grade): AI-fueled coding, debugging, planning and agent execution, now with additional power thanks to Anthropic’s acquisition of Bun.
Massive 200k context window: Collaborate on large repositories, academic papers, slide decks, spreadsheets or multi-step plans without losing context.
Long-running agents: Claude supports multi-agent workflows, tool execution and web browsing in addition to long-running tasks and subagent coordination.

4. NotebookLM

NotebookLM is Google's AI-powered research and thinking partner service powered by Gemini multimodal models. It processes your sources, be it PDFs, Google Docs, YouTube videos, audio files, websites or lecture notes and converts them into crystal-clear insights about the topic so you can actually understand it in detail.

Instead of having a generic chatbot, NotebookLM becomes an AI expert fine-tuned to your content through which you can study faster, discover creative ideas and understand difficult concepts.

Website ➡️ NotebookLM

Why is it top tier 🔥

NotebookLM is becoming one of the most efficient research and learning platforms. It’s not just summarising information, it’s about analysing your whole set of sources and building a structured understanding on top of it.

You might upload your lectures, articles, chapters, slide decks or even an entire research folder, anything you can imagine, and NotebookLM will map the relationships between concepts in the notebook, extract key ideas and surface connections that you might have missed.

It also includes precise citations for each answer, so you see the exact quotes your answers were drawn from at all times. The platform is great if you listen to audio at 1.5x when on the move, and if you prefer a deep, engaging conversation style. It’s like having two experts walk you through the material, highlighting the most important insights and explaining them in plain language.

Whether you need to write down your thoughts, review files, annotate and sort out assignments or research complex topics and find new creative ideas, NotebookLM can bring you speed and clarity that’s impossibly fast.

Some standout features include:

Multimodal source uploads: Share PDFs, Google Docs, YouTube videos, audio files and lecture recordings as well as websites and slides.
Deep insights across all sources: NotebookLM becomes your own personal expert, that has been trained on your data to find themes, patterns and connections.
Exact citations: Each answer is provided by direct quotation or citation from your references for maximum credibility and clarity.
Audio Overview: Turns all your sources into a dynamic spoken "Deep Dive" in audio, an on-demand personalised podcast you can listen to anywhere.
Study power-ups: Elaborate/create examples, flashcards, simple explanations for jargon words or construct structured summaries.
Presentation and outline generation: Add your content, and NotebookLM will turn out professional-looking outlines complete with your key points, examples, etc.
Creative exploration: Come up with product ideas, do research synthesis, strategy brainstorming, and daily opportunities discovery from your sources.
Real-world use cases: Great for students, professionals, researchers, content creators and founders, pretty much anyone who deals with information.

5. Cursor

Cursor is a smart code editor for engineers who want to get work done faster, debug more intelligently and build better with help from the world's brightest AI models. It feels familiar from the moment you open it, but it offers a complete set of tools for working with intelligent code, which understands your project.

Cursor can do Planning, Autocomplete and type prediction that learns from you, while also refactoring. The editor has smart actions that can be applied en masse, bug fixing, documentation and multi-file reasoning, all directly inside your editor.

Website ➡️ Cursor

Why is it top tier 🔥

Cursor has rapidly established itself as the best platform for an AI experimentation tool nowadays. Unlike AI chat tools, where you’d need to copy, paste and swap into the right context, Cursor understands your project’s structure, files, and dependencies. That allows it to produce accurate changes, hunt down bugs across your repo, write features end-to-end and even run multiple AI agents in parallel, which is something no other mainstream editor offers at this level.

You can select one of the world’s top coding models, GPT-5. 1 Codex Max, Claude 4.5 Opus, Gemini 3 Pro and Grok Code as well as Cursor’s Composer 1 itself (a high-speed agentic coding model especially designed for multi-step software tasks). In Max Mode, Cursor can use context windows as large as 1 million tokens, so you can parse even huge codebases with a single pass.

This evolution, combined with recent feature additions including Plan Mode, AI Code Reviews, Instant Grep, sandboxed terminals and browser-based app integration and complete multi-agent parallel development, makes Cursor less of an editor and more like having a collaborative engineering teammate.

Cursor speeds up every aspect of the development process, from idea to debugging to deployment, and that’s why it’s been my preferred code editor for all new projects.

Some standout features include:

Multi-Agent Parallel Coding: Run up to 8 agents at once, each with isolated worktrees or remote sandboxes. Great for exploring solutions in parallel.
Composer 1, Cursor agentic model: A rapid, fast-level coding model designed for multi-step reasoning over large code bases.
AI Code Review + Bugbot: Code reviews in the IDE, as well as automated bug detection on your GitHub or GitLab repositories, and even on your whole organisation’s servers.
Plan Mode (With clarifying questions): Cursor creates complete development plans, and its 3D Smart Questions ensure focused requirements before any coding.
Massive model support: Use GPT-5.1 Codex Max, Claude 4.5 Opus/Sonnet, Gemini 3 Pro, Grok Code and more.
Browser-in-Editor: The inbuilt web browser allows agents to debug DOM elements, learn UI structures and create web components in real-time.
Instant Grep (Beta): Search the entire codebase with excellent pattern matching across all models.
Max Mode for some really big context windows: Work on large monorepos and multi-file contexts with up to 1M tokens of context available.

6. Grok

Grok is xAI’s fast, real-time AI assistant engineered with a deep understanding of the X (Twitter) platform and powered by bleeding-edge models like Grok 4.1 Fast. It’s built for open-ended reasoning, real-time trend analysis and agentic workflows, which can play with tools, browse the web, analyse posts, run code and serve as a completely autonomous agent.

Website ➡️ Grok

Why is it top tier 🔥

Grok is not just a chatbot anymore; it has grown. It is one of the best real-world agent models with the recent release of Grok 4.1 Fast. It excels at tool-calling, deep research, sentiment analysis, customer support workflows, code execution, and multi-step planning, all with a massive 2 million token context window.

Since Grok is built into X it can have access to some of the fastest-moving information on the internet. This makes it extremely powerful for following breaking news, new trends, influencer opinions, public opinion, financial changes, or something that changes on a minute-by-minute basis.

Grok is also known for being less restricted than other AI assistants. It’s more straightforward, more flexible with prompts, and more open to exploring topics that other LLMs might refuse by default.

Faster inference, robust reasoning and high-performance tool calling mean Grok 4.1 Fast is the now-favoured real-time awareness choice of developers, researchers and creators everywhere.

Some standout features include:

Grok 4.1 Fast model: An agent-facing tool-calling model with a 2M token context designed for real-world workflows, agent prompts, customer support and detailed reasoning tasks.
Agent Tools API: Let's Grok, browse the web, search real-time posts on X, retrieve and analyse files, run Python code in a safe and secure sandbox, connect to MCP servers, and invoke multiple tools in parallel
State-of-the-art tool calling: Grok 4.1 Fast is one of the strongest models we found so far for function calling and multi-step reasoning that beats most of our competitors in benchmark datasets, including τ²-bench Telecom and Berkeley Function Calling v4.
Live real-time research + trend analysis: Grok can read X posts, get sentiment, follow breaking news and aggregate public opinion, which makes it an indispensable tool for creators, founders, journalists and analysts.
Deeper multi-turn reasoning: Long-horizon reinforcement learning helps the agent to perform well on long passages and large contexts.
Conversation style that is less restrictive and faster: Grok has also made a tradition of permitting more liberal prompt freedoms and a more straightforward conversational voice suitable for brainstorming and creativity.
Developer-friendly API: Production Agents are easy to build and can execute code, call tools, query, and plan with long context.

7. Zapier

Zapier is a no-code/low-code automation and AI orchestration platform connecting 2,000+ web apps, where you can automate workflows, take control of repetitive tasks and eliminate the need for complex coding. It’s now become one of the most powerful tools for building smart workflows across apps that blend traditional automations with AI-based decision-making and content handling.

Website ➡️ Zapier

Why is it top tier 🔥

Zapier stands out because it makes the otherwise complicated, linking apps, flowing data between them, triggering follow-up actions and scheduling tasks to perform at particular times, something you can create in minutes without writing code. In 2025, Zapier moved beyond classic "trigger → action" automation: its AI-enhanced workflows and agentic capabilities now include being able to sprinkle AI logic into your flows. This means parsing emails, summarising content, creating responses, converting data, routing complex workflows or virtually anything that can be done programmatically without human intervention.

Whether you’re a solo creator, freelancer, or run a small or medium-sized team, Zapier massively reduces friction, cuts down repetitive tasks, and lets you focus on creative or high-impact work. From 2-step automations to multi-step AI logic across 8,000+ apps, its flexibility is what makes it a backbone tool for productivity.

Some standout features include:

"Zaps", Automated Workflows: Create triggers and actions across apps. For example: new email comes → parse it → create a task in your PM tool, and then it can automatically send you a Slack alert. It's important to be able to automate this type of "workflow" and utilise creativity, as any set trigger that's connected with some notification capability.
AI-Powered Automation and Agents: Use "AI by Zapier" to add steps that review text, summarise emails or documents, create responses, parse unstructured data and run conditional logic, all within your workflows.
Integration with an Incredible Library of Apps (8000+ apps): Connect email, forms, sheets, project management, CRM, social media, or any other category from a wide selection of apps and tools on the market (even specialised ones) with zero custom code. This flexibility is what makes Zapier powerful for almost all work types.
Beginner-friendly setup: Easy-to-use interface and Copilot (AI Beta) for creating workflows from a prompt

8. Warp Terminal

Warp Terminal is the world's fastest developer tool as it is an AI-Powered, Rust-Based terminal available for macOS, Linux (and now Windows!), which turns your command line into a fully featured, intelligent development workspace. It combines the speed and reliability of a native terminal, including a suite of modern features like AI-driven command suggestions, automation, team sharing, and, most recently, agent-style workflows with full terminal capabilities.

Website ➡️ Warp Terminal

Why is it top tier 🔥

Warp was once a "smart terminal", but with the rollout of Agents 3.0 (Nov 2025), it has become a complete agentic development studio, quite possibly the most sophisticated one available anywhere.

Other AI tools only recommend commands, unlike Warp’s agents, which can now work with interactive CLIs in general, REPLs, debuggers, database shells, system monitors, and full-screen apps. This "Full Terminal Use" means the agent can run live debugging, database queries, server commands, system monitoring, or heavy deployment workflows live and under your watch.

Warp also builds spec-driven planning and collaborative code review on top, so nothing is lost when it comes to the team workflow (Slack, GitHub Actions, Linear). The upshot: you end up with a terminal that isn’t just faster or smarter, it’s an actual software-engineering assistant capable of managing large parts of your dev workflow on its own, under your guidance.

Some standout features include:

Full Terminal Use for Agents: Warp’s agents can operate interactive shells (databases, REPLs, debuggers, top/system monitors, etc.), run live commands, inspect output in real-time, and even handle full-screen CLI apps the same way a human would.
Spec-driven Development with a plan: You and your teammates decide on a plan before writing code, version it, improve it, and ensure it's attached to pull requests through the code lifecycle.
Interactive Code Review: The agent writes code, and you review diffs, inline comments, request changes or accept. You have complete control over how they are going to be deployed, and you take care that the output is production-ready.
Command Suggestions and Natural Language Input powered by AI: With Warp, you can just talk in natural language or simple commands to run a command, debug that error, generate workflow scripts or go through complicated workflows without having to guess the correct shell line.
Multi-model & Mixed-LLM Support: Warp supports models from the most popular providers, so you get to choose whichever model is suitable for your tasks, whether it's lightweight shell automation or heavy-based reasoning and code generation.
Agent Management and Collaboration: Run numerous agents simultaneously, monitor progress, share sessions with teammates and step in if needed. Ideal for collaboration and sophisticated workflows.

9. Edubrain (sponsored)

Edubrain is an AI-powered homework and study assistant that is designed to help students understand academic concepts with clear step-by-step explanations. The platform is capable of working with JavaScript code, art homework, graphic design projects and other subjects.

All you need to do is upload images (photos or screenshots), or PDFs (scanned handwritten notes), and Edubrain breaks it down into simple parts, so you actually learn the material instead of just memorising answers. Another great feature the platform provides is an AI humaniser and AI detector for converting AI-generated content into more friendly, human conversation and detecting when content has been generated by an AI tool.

Website ➡️ Edubrain.ai

Why it’s top tier 🔥

What makes Edubrain stand out is that it operates as if you hired a patient tutor on call for just about every subject, math and science, humanities or computer science, economics and more. There are no "cloned" responses, just clean step-by-step reasoning, as it scans similar questions from its database and adjusts explanations based on your follow-up questions.

That makes it particularly strong for students on tight deadlines, international learners in need of a clearer explanation in their native language, or anyone who finds textbook explanations hard to follow.

Some standout features include:

AI humaniser and AI detector: Create engaging human conversational writing while detecting whether content has been generated by an AI tool
Flexible input options: Add photos, notes, PDFs and typed questions
Tutor-style reasoning: Solutions are presented in helpful, easy-to-understand steps
Full output control: Select short answers, expandable detailed responses, diagrams or images
Wide variety of topics: Anything from algebra and calculus to history, biology, physics, and computer science
Strict privacy: Your file is only used (read) during the session and deleted afterwards.
Refinement via additional questions: Request even more details, clarified meaning, and other ways to approach the area of discussion

Edubrain is especially useful for students juggling multiple deadlines or anyone who needs clearer explanations than those typically provided by textbooks or class notes. It turns complex homework into manageable steps, helping you actually understand the "why," not just the "what."

10. Higgsfield AI

Higgsfield AI is an image-and-video generative tool for creators, marketers, and social media producers alike, built in the modern-day, providing cinematic motion control, photorealistic details, and export acceleration for content at any resolution. Designed to transform basic prompts or images into polished visual content on the fly, with new models, effects packs and editing tools.

Website ➡️ Higgsfield

Why is it top tier 🔥

Higgsfield AI is more than just another image-to-video solution; it’s built entirely around cinematic direction and visual storytelling. With its camera control, movement presets, lifelike VFX (visual effects), and media export functions, it is a perfect asset for those producing material for social media, advertisement, product displays, short film or marketing. A process that once required studios, cameras and motion rigs can now be done in-browser or on your laptop, exponentially faster, cheaper and more accessible.

So whether you are an influencer that needs reels fast, all the way to a start-up creating marketing assets, or even a creative playing with visuals, Higgsfield is about quality, flexibility and speed.

Some standout features include:

Cinematic Video Generation with Directorial Control: With the newest model, DoP I2V-01-preview, Higgsfield allows you to create dynamic video clips from still images or prompts. You can manipulate the motion of the camera, lighting, framing and scene composition to produce results that look "like film" using AI.
Powerful Image and Video Pipeline (Canvas + Effects + Export): The Canvas workspace is the image editor you’ve always wanted, with effects, inpaint, replacement, animation and over 25 export options to social media, film footage, ads and much more
Fast "Turbo" Mode for Rapid Iterations: Custom-built "Turbo" generation model allows you to iterate visuals quickly, perfect for storyboarding, ideation or fast content turnaround.
Preset Libraries, VFX & Character-Friendly Tools: Through the integrated "Effects Packs" and stock VFX, plus support like face-swap, character ID, style presets, etc., Higgsfield makes generating content as easy as possible for creators from advertisers to social-media influencers.
Video and Social Media Optimisation: Export presets adjusted for different aspect ratios (square, vertical, cinematic), optimised for TikTok, Reels or YouTube and other social platforms

Conclusion

AI tools are moving fast, and those who master them have a huge advantage. The tools in this roundup will enable you to work smarter, faster and more creatively by enhancing creativity, shortening research timescales, automating workflows and removing the friction from common tasks on a daily basis.

Your stack will shift over time as developers and tech enthusiasts come out with new models and features, but the goal remains the same. To build a workflow that gives you more time, clarity and space. Experiment, perfect, and double down on what’s working.

The future belongs to those who can collaborate with AI, and this toolkit is a powerful place to start.

Stay up to date with AI, tech, productivity, and personal growth

If you enjoyed these articles, connect and follow me across social media, where I share content related to all of these topics 🔥

I also have a newsletter where I share my thoughts and knowledge on AI, tech, productivity, and personal growth.

Top comments (18)

Madza • Jan 10

Killer toolset man! Can do so much when all of those combined! 🔥👍💯

Andrew Baisden • Jan 11

Truly, and there can be a lot of use cases when combining just the top two.

Riya • Jan 13

Great list of tools! I’ve been using ChatGPT and Midjourney for a while, but Perplexity and NotebookLM sound like game-changers for research and learning. Definitely bookmarking this—thanks for sharing!

Andrew Baisden • Jan 18

Truly! Perplexity and NotebookLM together are so powerful check out some tutorials on YouTube to see how other people are using them.

Kieran Roberts • Jan 11

Nice one, will have to explore some of these that I haven't yet checked out. We adopted Cursor this year too and has been a big productivity booster thus far.