Three AI Tools I'm Using on the Daily – And Happy to Pay For
Product teams are beginning to find the right use cases and user experiences for AI-driven tools. We're moving beyond the chatbot and ✨ menu towards integrated experiences. Here are three tools that are now part of my daily workflow.
Pieter van Noordennen |
Three AI Tools I'm Using on the Daily – And Happy to Pay For
Only 10 days into the New Year, and it feels like product and design teams are really getting comfortable with the user experiences around AI.
Starting the year, three AI tools have made their way into my daily workflows. And they are all things that have created stickiness and willingness-to-pay for me, not simple chat wrappers behind a ✨ emoji.
Superhuman AI
I discovered Superhuman three years ago and it changed me from a “Sorry for the late response” guy to a Zero Inboxer, almost overnight. I flipped on their award-winning AI embarassingly late in the game, but email isn’t the same any more. And I don’t use it the way you might think.
As a writer and communicator, I LIKE writing emails. Tab-completing responses doesn’t feel like an authentic way of maintaining connections, for me at least.
Superhuman AI helps with all the not-fun parts of email. I schedule a lot of meetings across time zones and take it as a point of personal pride to put meeting proposals in the local time zone for whomever I’m pitching, especially if it’s a 1:1 meeting. Rather than dive into TimeAndDate.com’s Meeting Planner for the zillionth time, with Superhuman AI, I type in “9am ET / ?? IST” and it auto-fills the right time.
The AI, for now, is included in the base $30/month subscription. I’ve done the math — it works.
GitHub Copilot Chat
Every developer knows about GitHub CoPilot and it’s “press tab, get runnable code” capabilities. GitHub estimates that 50% of code generated today is aided by AI.
But the recently developed CoPilot Chat, a simple chat window in your IDE of choice like VSCode, puts the convenience of a chatbot directly in the local workflow next to your code.
It can read open code windows in the IDE, provide recommendations or talk you through a problem, and has a slew of useful built-in commands like /fix and /tests. At GitHub Universe, they announced a Partner program that looks amazing for Dev Tools companies, where you can @ reference an AI chat from a third-party company with specific asks. Super-cool for NextGen dev tool companies like SailPlane and Mobb if they choose to participate.
My memory for “how things work in X language” is really bad. Like regex and format strings and list comprehension. Tab-completion would give me the fish, but part of what I love about coding is rediscovering structures of thought, that is, re-learning how to fish. Chat helps with that: “Remind me how format strings work and why I would use them.” CoPilot chat tells me the What and the Why, reads my code and my cursor position, and provides functional code I can left-arrow into my file.
As a hobbyist coder who has had the AI revolution reinvigorate my love of hands-on keyboard coding, CoPilot Chat was the deciding factor in paying the $100/year subscription when my free trial came to an end.
Perplexity.ai
I’d heard of and even used this tool in the very early days. With their latest raise (valued at $520M), I went back to try this “search engine killer” and totally had my doors blown off. It is amazing, and has replaced the irreplacable search bar for me.
Last week, I had a challenging work situation that required a LOT of Googling. Fighting through pop-up ads, outdated articles, and a load of slow page-loading, and I was frustrated and looking at many hours of manual labor.
I popped open Perplexity and put in the same search. In seconds, I had the answer I needed, generated Python code that I could copy-paste-run to automate 90% of the work, and references to the articles where I could deep dive for specifics.
I worry a bit on the business model here and what it means for publishers and content creators. With the answers being so easy (and my guess that Google fast-follows this UX quickly), there will be less traffic going to the pages of the content creators, and less ad impressions, revenue, etc. I’ve never liked that business model for publishers anyway, but an already-hard thing to do (make money from creating content on the Internet) will get even harder. That’s rant for another time, and in the world we live in, Perplexity is my new search engine of choice.
I’m sure there are many, many more to come. What tools are you excited about in the New Year?