The "AI Fatigue" is real. 🤯
Let’s be honest: my bookmarks bar is a graveyard of "revolutionary" AI tools that I tried once and never opened again.
As developers, we want to ship code and create content, not spend 10 hours a week debugging a prompt chain just to get a mediocre result. We hate hype. We love utility.
I spent the last month purging my workflow. I tested dozens of tools to find the ones that actually save time rather than just adding complexity.
Here is my current stack for 2024. No fluff, just the tools that survived the cut. 👇
1. Claude 3.5 Sonnet (The Logic Engine) 🧠
If you are still pasting code into GPT-4, you need to try Claude 3.5 Sonnet.
For technical writing and refactoring, it just feels... smarter. It hallucinates less on obscure libraries and writes documentation that sounds like a human actually wrote it.
Why it’s in my stack:
The Artifacts feature. You can ask it to "Build a React component for a pricing table with a toggle switch," and it renders the interactive preview right in the side panel. It’s a prototyping beast.
💡 Pro Tip: Use it to explain complex regex or legacy code. It’s better at "rubber ducking" than any other model I've tried.
2. Cursor (The Editor, Not The Plugin) 💻
I finally ditched VS Code + Copilot for Cursor, and I’m not looking back.
Cursor isn't just a plugin; it's a fork of VS Code that understands your entire codebase. You don't have to copy-paste context anymore. You just hit Cmd+K and say "Refactor this function to handle edge case X," and it checks your other files to make sure it doesn't break anything.
It has nuked about 40% of the boilerplate typing I used to do.
3. Midjourney v6 (Still the King) 🎨
I wanted to find a free alternative, I really did. But for blog covers and OG images, nothing beats Midjourney’s aesthetic quality yet.
DALL-E 3 is better at following strict instructions, but Midjourney v6 creates images that have "soul." It stops your blog posts from looking like generic corporate spam.
💡 Pro Tip: Use the
--sref(Style Reference) parameter to keep your visual identity consistent across all your posts.
4. Textideo (The Video Bottleneck Solver) 🎥
Here is the biggest friction point in 2024: Video.
Writing a dev blog is easy. Generating an image is fast. But making a video teaser or a tutorial? That usually means opening Premiere Pro and crying for 3 hours.
I recently started using Textideo, and it’s the only text-to-video tool I’ve stuck with.
Most video AIs create weird, morphing nightmares that scare viewers. Textideo feels different—it’s designed to bridge the gap between a simple text prompt and a video that is actually usable for content.
How I use it:
- I write a script (or have Claude summarize my blog post).
- I feed it to Textideo.
- I get a clean video snippet to post on Twitter/LinkedIn to drive traffic to my article.
It handles the context surprisingly well and doesn't require a degree in prompt engineering to get a result that looks professional. If you want to get into the "faceless channel" trend or just promo your SaaS, this is the cheat code.
5. Perplexity (The StackOverflow Killer) 🔍
I barely Google programming errors anymore.
Perplexity creates a synthesized answer cited from multiple sources (documentation, Reddit, StackOverflow). It cuts through the SEO-spam articles that plague Google search results these days.
If I need to know "Best library for dragging and dropping in React 2024," Perplexity gives me the answer + the pros/cons table in seconds.
6. ElevenLabs (The Voice) 🗣️
If you are using Textideo for video, you need good audio.
The default robotic voices are cringey. ElevenLabs is currently the gold standard for AI speech. The latency is low, and the "Speech-to-Speech" feature allows you to record a mumble and have it turned into a professional narrator's voice while keeping your intonation.
7. v0.dev (The Frontend Accelerator) ⚛️
Made by Vercel. You describe a UI, and it gives you the code.
But the killer feature is that it uses Shadcn/UI + Tailwind CSS. It gives you clean, copy-paste-ready code that you can actually use in production, not some weird spaghetti HTML.
💡 Pro Tip: Use v0 to generate the "boring" parts of your app (settings pages, login forms, dashboards) so you can focus on the core logic.
The Takeaway
The goal isn't to use more AI. It's to find the tools that remove the parts of the job you hate.
- Hate writing boilerplate? Cursor.
- Hate searching for stock footage? Textideo.
- Hate styling CSS divs? v0.
Build your stack, save your time, and go touch some grass. 🌿
What's one tool I missed that you use daily? Drop it in the comments, I want to test it. 👇
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