AI Tools My Friends and I Use for Real Work

Let’s talk about some AI tools. Some I use myself, some my friends use. I’m an independent worker — I deal with AI tools every day.
Cursor is my main coding tool. The full-project context indexing is excellent. Privacy could be better. Hermes Agent is my personal assistant. Near perfect. If I had to pick a flaw, the first layer of persistent hot memory has a hard character cap. But Hermes has more than one memory layer — the fourth layer can even plug into third-party vector databases — so it’s barely a limitation. ChatGPT handles my day-to-day writing. Claude does code review. The tool I’m happiest with is my search engine, Phind. Documentation lookup, source code search, error fixes, code examples — it does everything.
A designer friend of mine lives in Midjourney. It’s the one AI tool he’s truly satisfied with. Plenty of good image generators have come out, but MJ is the only one that gives him ideas when he’s stuck.
Another friend does video work. He’s been on Runway and CapCut for the past year. Runway is the most stable for video generation. CapCut handles short-form content, and the AI captions and voiceover save him hours. ElevenLabs is his go-to for voice — human-quality, can’t tell it’s AI.
A friend in cross-border e-commerce runs his customer emails, product descriptions, and ad copy all through ChatGPT. He used to hire someone for this at three thousand a month. Now the free tier covers most of it.
A podcaster I know uses Descript as his main tool. Edit text, edit audio. The silence removal alone saves him at least an hour a day.
Originally from https://saas.pet/blog/best-ai-tools-2026/