ryan collison. i write about AI agents and the tooling around them — mostly what actually ships versus what gets announced. i also write about science at ideasthesia and about everything else at themonotrope.
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I read AI tool reviews constantly. It's part of my job — or at least I've convinced myself it is, which might be the same thing. I read the blog posts, the YouTube breakdowns, the Twitter threads, the "I tested X for 30 days" articles.
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I used Notion for everything for two years. Tasks, notes, project management, client tracking, writing drafts, bookmarks, meal planning — if it could go in a database, it went in Notion. Then I stopped. Not because Notion got worse, but because I realized I'd been building a cathedral when
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I don't use the phrase "this changes everything" lightly. I've written hundreds of words on this site specifically about why that phrase is almost always wrong when applied to AI tools. New models ship, demos impress, the hype cycle spins, and then you actually
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Every major AI platform has a free tier. ChatGPT Free, Claude Free, Gemini Free, Microsoft Copilot, Perplexity — you can use all of them without paying a dollar. This is presented as generosity or competition or democratization. It is none of those things. It is a customer acquisition strategy, and the
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Anthropic's Model Context Protocol has been out long enough now that the ecosystem has a shape. Most of that shape is abandoned GitHub repos and half-working connectors. But one MCP server has survived in my daily workflow for months — not because it's flashy, but because
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I've written about the hex constraint in the abstract — why six tools, why constraint matters, why the tool collector's instinct works against you. This is the concrete version. These are my six tools, why each one earns its slot, what I've tried to replace
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There's a new AI tool every week. Sometimes every day. Your Twitter feed shows someone building something incredible in a tool you've never heard of, and the quiet thought surfaces: maybe I'm using the wrong thing. Maybe there's a better option. Maybe
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A year ago I had 14 active AI subscriptions. I know this because I went back through my credit card statements — a practice I recommend and also find slightly nauseating. Fourteen tools, most of which I was paying for monthly, each of which seemed essential when I signed up. Today
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Over the past year I've used Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Jasper, Copy.ai, Writesonic, Rytr, Sudowrite, Lex, Wordtune, Grammarly's AI features, and Notion AI for writing tasks. Not brief tests — I ran actual work through each of them. Client emails, article drafts, marketing copy, documentation, social media
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I've used both Claude Pro and ChatGPT Plus every day for six months. Not for benchmarks, not for trick prompts, not for the kind of adversarial testing that makes good Twitter content and bad purchasing decisions. For work. The boring kind — drafting, editing, analyzing documents, writing code, answering
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I've built a lot of automations over the past two years. Some of them run every day and have genuinely changed how I work. Most of them ran twice, broke once, and now sit in my n8n dashboard like digital tombstones — monuments to the afternoon I spent building
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I work in the music industry. Not as a hobbyist who plays guitar on weekends — I'm involved in artist deals, royalty management, and catalog operations. I've used TuneCore and Songtrust. I've evaluated catalog acquisition offers. When I test AI music tools, I'm