The five-tool stack running my week (spoiler: mostly AI)

I get asked about my stack more than almost anything else, usually by people expecting a long list of clever apps. It is a short list. Five things do most of the work, and most of them are AI now.

The point of a stack is not how many tools it has. It is how little you have to think about the mechanics so you can spend your attention on the decisions. Here is what earns its place.

Claude, for thinking out loud

This is the one I would give up last. I use Claude the way I used to use a whiteboard and an hour I did not have. Drafting a delivery plan, pressure-testing a hiring decision, turning a messy set of notes into a structure, rewriting something until it says what I actually mean.

What it replaced: the version of me that would sit on a blank document for forty minutes waiting to feel ready. Now I start with a rough dump and argue with it until the thinking is clean. It is not the writer. It is the thing that gets me from zero to a first draft I can react to, which is the hard part.

ChatGPT, for the fast lookup

Claude does my long-form thinking. ChatGPT tends to be where I go for quick, self-contained questions where I just want a fast answer and to move on. Different tool, different reach for.

What it replaced: a dozen browser tabs and the fifteen minutes of skimming that used to sit between a question and a usable answer.

Copilot, in the actual work

Inside documents and spreadsheets, Copilot is the one that lives where the work already is. I do not have to leave the file to get help with it. Summarising a long thread, drafting the first pass of a status update, cleaning up a data table.

What it replaced: the copy-paste-out, do-the-thing, copy-paste-back loop. The value is not raw capability, it is that it removes the friction of switching context. The tool that meets you in the work beats the better tool you have to go somewhere else to use.

The calendar, still the source of truth

Not AI, and non-negotiable. My calendar is the single source of truth for where my time goes, including the blocks that are not meetings. Deep work is a calendar entry. The weekly review is a calendar entry. If it is not on the calendar it is not real, it is a hope.

What it replaced: the fantasy that I would find time. You do not find time. You place it, or it gets taken.

A plain notes app, for capture

Also not AI, deliberately. Capture has to be frictionless or you will not do it, and I have never found an AI note tool that beats a plain fast text box for the moment an idea shows up. I sort it later. The job of the capture layer is to catch the thought before it evaporates, nothing more.

What it replaced: the ideas I used to lose because logging them was one step too many.

Where AI does not help

Worth saying plainly, because the honest version of a stack includes its limits.

AI does not make the call for me. It can lay out the options, weigh the tradeoffs, and draft the reasoning, but the decision to hire that person, kill that project, or hold that standard is mine, and it should be. Anything with real judgement and real consequences, the AI is a sounding board, not a decision-maker.

It is also poor at anything needing genuine context about the specific humans on my team. It does not know that this person is stretched, that this client is nervous for reasons that are not on paper, that this project is politically loaded. That context is the actual job, and it does not live in any tool.

Five things. Three of them AI, two of them boring. That is the whole stack. The tools are not the point. What they free up my attention for is.