AI Tools I Actually Use Every Day (and the Ones I Dropped)

Everyone's AI stack is a graveyard of subscriptions. Mine was too, until I made a rule: a tool only stays if I reach for it without thinking, at least three times a week. Here's what survived.

The keepers

• A coding assistant inside my editor — for boilerplate, refactors, and 'what does this error mean at 2am'.
• An image model for concepting — moodboards, storyboard frames, and client presentations. Final art still gets human finishing.
• A voice synthesis tool for Sinhala voiceovers — good enough for drafts and surprisingly good for finals with direction.
• An upscaler — non-negotiable for turning AI output into 300-DPI print assets.

The ones I dropped

I dropped the all-in-one 'AI design suites' that promised to replace Photoshop — they produce generic work and lock you into their templates. I also dropped anything that needed more prompt-fiddling than just doing the task manually. If the tool costs more attention than it saves, it's a hobby, not a workflow.

AI doesn't replace the designer. It replaces the blank page — which was always the most expensive part.