The AI Tools That Survived 2025

Be honest.

How many AI tools did you bookmark this year that you never touched? How many "game-changers" are sitting in a folder called "To Try" that you'll never open?

You're not lazy. You're buried.

2025 moved too fast. New model every week. New startup every day. Your feed became a firehose of launches, demos, and hype threads. Each one promising to "revolutionize your workflow."

You didn't have time to test them all. You didn't have the knowledge to know which ones actually mattered. So you either tried everything and committed to nothing, or you froze and stuck with what you knew.

Meanwhile, the tools that could actually move the needle? Lost in the noise.

I get it. I was drowning in the same current.

So I did the work. Tested hundreds. Tracked what I actually opened every day. Tracked what shipped results, not just demos.

Eight tools made the cut. Not the most hyped. Not the most funded. The daily drivers—the ones I reach for before coffee and use until I close my laptop.

This is the stack that survived.

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Before I break down each tool, here's what separated the winners from the graveyard:

The DAILY DRIVER Test:

If a tool didn't pass all five, it got cut. Didn't matter how cool the demo was.

What it is: An agentic browser that automates web tasks and pulls context from anywhere.

Why it made the cut: The browser is the gateway to everything. Email. Research. Socials. Tools. If you're going to replace one thing in your workflow, start here.

I've been a beta user since early 2025. Comet is now my default browser.

Two use cases that moved the needle:

Automation:

Context Engineering (the real unlock):

When a prospect hits my inbox, I don't manually dig anymore. Comet runs my saved prompts automatically:

I supplement with Scrape Creators and other tools, but Comet is the orchestration layer. It pulls from emails, websites, socials—whatever I need—and brings it back fast.

The insight most people miss: Stop thinking of AI as a chatbot. Start thinking of it as a context engineering platform. The person who controls the context controls the output.

iOS app dropping soon. I'll drop my favorite saved prompts below so you can steal them.

What it is: An agentic coding assistant that lives in your terminal. But calling it a "coding tool" is like calling the internet a "library."

Why it made the cut: There's secret sauce running in Claude Code that only the gods at Anthropic understand. Yes it’s a dev tool, but it’s really much more than that. It's a Willy Wonka factory for making anything come to life.

The reframe most people miss:

It lives in the terminal. Yes, it writes code. But limiting it to "coding" is leaving 90% of the value on the table.

Claude Code connects to anything. MCPs to Perplexity. Figma for design. Your actual Mac via computer use. I've had it answer my text messages and generate reports on who's messaging me most, with language sentiment analysis included.

It's an imagination-come-to-life platform.

How I actually use it:

As a content and proposal engine:

It has RAG access to every proposal I've written, every Big Players post, our entire brand library. I've built orchestration layers with sub-agents for research, writing, hook creation, content strategy.

As a build-anything platform:

This year we shipped:

Projects that would've required six-figure budgets and months of dev time a few years ago? We can knock this out now in a few weeks. Custom-built for our exact workflow. No compromises. No templates. Exactly what we imagined.

The insight: You don't need to know how to code to use this. Claude Code will tell you exactly what to do. It will instruct you. You dream it, it builds it, and it's yours.

What it is: Custom instructions and knowledge bases you build once and call from anywhere (mobile, desktop, Claude Code, or share with your team).

Why it made the cut: Five minutes in, I knew this was a daily driver. It locked me into the Claude ecosystem permanently.

Here's what clicked immediately: I can build a skill once, and a non-technical team member can use it within minutes. Repeatable tasks and institutional knowledge become instantly transferable. No training docs. No SOPs nobody reads. Just "use this skill."

And it's friction-free to call from anywhere. 3am in my bedroom? Claude Skills is there.

The system I built (and use daily):

I wanted a master storytelling engine backed by psychology. Not vibes. Science.

Here's how I built it:

Now when I write (for myself, for clients, for Big Players), I have a psychology-backed storytelling co-pilot that understands hooks, narrative arcs, contrast, and what makes people feel something.

The real unlock: Skills stack.

You don't use one skill at a time. You orchestrate them.

Need that storytelling skill + a specific client's brand voice + LinkedIn formatting rules? Layer them. Need proposal writing + competitive research + pricing psychology? Stack them.

It calls everything at once. No switching. No copy-pasting between tools.

This is how you compress expertise into reusable systems.

What it is: Google's latest image generation model. And it's not close anymore.

Why it made the cut: This thing generates perfect text. Real-looking humans for UGC. Images that are 100% foolable to the human eye. Character consistency across multiple scenes.

Read that again. Perfect text. Consistent characters. Photorealistic humans.

We just leapfrogged years of "AI images look weird" overnight.

The unlock nobody's talking about: JSON and TOON prompting.

Most people type a prompt and pray. Here's what actually works:

What this actually means for your business:

Visual storytelling that used to take hundreds of hours in graphic design? Minutes.

Infographics, social assets, ad concepts, storyboards. All at a quality and speed that was completely out of reach six months ago.

I've been sharing workflows and examples on X. The response has been insane. I’m waking up to hundreds of DMs daily asking how I'm building this stuff.

What I've built with it:

Internal tools using Nano Banana Pro as the base layer for:

Coming soon: I'm doing a webinar series on this next month and releasing some of our internal tools early next year. The stuff we're creating is legitimately insane.

What it is: Google's latest video generation model. And yes, Google now owns the best video model too.

The honest take: Video gen is less mature than image gen. More prone to errors. More re-rolls to get it right.

But here's why Veo 3.1 made the cut: control.

I'm defining "best" by how much we can actually steer it and how effective it is in real content we ship. Not cherry-picked demos. Not Twitter hype threads. Real content that performs.

What makes it work:

The real workflow: Nano Banana → Veo

We generate seed frames in Nano Banana Pro with exact visual direction, then bring them into Veo for motion. Granular scene control. When we need to re-roll a few times to nail it, we can—because we're steering the output, not praying.

Results: Multiple posts breaking 1M+ views built on this exact flow.

Where it actually shines right now:

The insight: Don't try to one-prompt a viral video. Use AI video to enhance the story you're already telling. The tech improves every month—but right now, augmentation beats full generation every time.

What it is: Adobe's visual storyboarding canvas with multiple AI image and video models built in.

Why it made the cut: This is where our entire team lives for visual content creation.

Here's the honest trade-off: The model selection isn't as extensive as FAL or Replicate. But what it lacks in model diversity, it absolutely destroys in UX.

Why UX matters more than model count:

Our entire team onboarded in minutes. Non-technical people are now rapidly iterating on ad concepts and storyboards without asking me how to connect to an API or spin up a workflow.

The canvas approach changes everything:

The sleeper feature nobody talks about: Double-click any text inside a generated image and edit it directly.

When something is 90% there but the copy needs a tweak? Don't re-roll the whole thing. Just fix it. This workflow alone saves hours every week.

The bigger strategic play:

Adobe made a smart move: they're not beholden to just their Firefly model. They've integrated high-performing models from across the ecosystem. That flexibility + their UX expertise = the best rapid iteration environment for ad and content creation right now.

Best for: Teams. Rapid ad concepting. Storyboarding. Anyone who needs to test multiple creative directions fast without touching a terminal.

What it is: AI-powered presentations, slide decks, and websites from a prompt.

Why it made the cut: I have a problem. I write 10-20 page documents packed with every detail, every caveat, every piece of supporting evidence.

I know people don't read them. You know people don't read them.

Gamma is my intervention.

How I actually use it:

I still write the deep analysis. The proposals. The strategy docs. All the details that matter. Then I take that wall of text and turn it into something people will actually look at.

I'm making several slide decks every single week:

What makes it stick:

The honest comparison:

Google Slides? Tedious. PowerPoint? A relic. Figma Slides? Nice, but still friction.

Gamma just removes the resistance. Prompt → deck → send. Done.

The Big Players data point: Their valuation per employee is absolutely insane. When a small team commands that kind of number, pay attention to what they built.

What it is: An AI-native IDE. My home base for code, writing, and everything in between.

Why it made the cut: Yes, I use Claude Code. I trigger it from Cursor. They're not competing, they're stacked.

But Cursor as home base gives me something Claude Code alone doesn't: visual control.

Why I need both:

Claude Code is the magic wand. Cursor is the workshop.

I enjoy coding. I enjoy writing. I want to see my files, edit directly, work in markdown. Not just watch a terminal scroll by.

What Cursor actually does now:

It started as tab-complete on steroids. It's evolved into something else entirely:

The update that changed everything:

They just shipped visual editing. Design directly on the rendered website. Move things around. Edit copy. Adjust layouts. No code view required.

The unlock for non-programmers:

If you're a "vibe coder" or frontend designer who doesn't want to live in syntax? Cursor now lets you see the visual output and edit from there. The barrier to entry just collapsed.

The bottom line: Cursor is shipping updates at a pace that's genuinely hard to keep up with. It's my IDE of choice, and the gap between Cursor and everything else is widening by the week.

Arc Browser — I loved it. Then they abandoned it. Comet filled the gap and then some.

ChatGPT — The OG. Still in there once a day for personal tasks (their voice mode is unmatched and the mobile app is legitimately best-in-class). But for work? My usage dropped significantly. Claude picked up the slack.

GPT Image 1 — Remember when this broke the internet? All the memes. The Ghibli era. It was the undisputed king for about five minutes. Nano Banana passed it and kept running.

Sora — There's something genuinely fun here. But when I'm actually shipping content on deadline, I keep reaching for Veo 3.1 and the Nano Banana flow instead. Sora 2 still hits hard and the highs are very high.

The bigger point: I don't want Google winning everything. I don't want OpenAI as the only game in town either. Competition is why this list looks completely different than it would've six months ago.

We're the ones who win when these giants keep one-upping each other.

I'm genuinely excited to see what OpenAI ships next.

2025 was the year AI tools went from "interesting experiment" to "how I actually work."

The tools that survived do one of two things exceptionally well:

Stop collecting tools. Start building systems. The person with 8 tools they've mastered will outperform the person with 80 tools they've tried every single time.

There's never been a better time to build. To turn what's in your head into something real. To ship the thing you've been sitting on. To stop waiting for permission or budget or the "right moment."

I know from the many of you who filled out the onboarding survey, you're looking to build. To scale. To move faster than you thought possible.

These tools get you there.

But I'm one person with one workflow. What did I miss?

Is there a tool, prompt, or workflow that should be in my rotation? Something moving the needle for you that I'm sleeping on?

Tell me in the comments. Shoot me an email. DM me on X.

I'm always looking for the next unlock.

Now go build something.

Resources:

🔗 My favorite Perplexity Comet prompts for prospect research

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