AI Tools & Skills
A working list of the AI tools, models and skills I rely on — menu-bar apps, coding agents, model evaluation sites, and the skills worth borrowing.
Terminal
cmux
A native macOS terminal built on Ghostty, with vertical tabs, split panes and notification rings — built for running several AI coding agents side by side.
Open source · Free
cmux setup guide
Running agents in parallel
Artem Zhutov’s guide to driving a fleet of agents from cmux — an orchestrator on top, with a dashboard, sessions and workspaces underneath, so ten tabs stop becoming ten guesses.
Free
Coding agent
Claude Code
Anthropic’s agentic coding tool. It works directly in your codebase from the terminal, IDE or web, carrying a task from request through to a shipped change.
From $20/mo on Pro · I run Claude Max
Coding agent
Codex
OpenAI’s coding agent for the terminal, IDE and web. Describe what you want and it reads, writes and runs code across your repository.
Included with ChatGPT · I run ChatGPT Pro
Knowledge base
Obsidian
A local-first markdown knowledge base. Your notes stay as plain files on your own machine, linked into a graph you control — the store everything else feeds.
Free for personal use
Menu bar
CodexBar
Usage limits, credit balances and reset countdowns for Codex, Claude Code and 40+ AI coding providers, all from the macOS menu bar.
Open source · Free
Desktop & menu-bar tools
More small native apps that keep an agent fleet in view.
RepoBar
Open source · Free
Keeps GitHub work in view from the menu bar — CI status, open issues, pull requests, releases and rate-limit health for every repo you follow.
Typora
$14.99 one-time · 15-day trial
Where Obsidian holds the linked vault, Typora is for the single document. A clean, distraction-free live preview for drafting one piece and exporting it to PDF, Word or HTML.
Claude skills
The Anthropic skills I reach for most — document work and builders.
Open source
Fills forms, merges and splits files, and pulls text and tables out of PDFs — the document work that used to mean a dedicated tool.
docx
Open source
Creates and edits Word documents with tracked changes, comments and formatting kept intact.
xlsx
Open source
Builds and edits Excel workbooks — formulas, formatting and multiple sheets — and reads the numbers back.
pptx
Open source
Generates and edits PowerPoint decks, keeping layouts, themes and speaker notes in place.
skill-creator
Open source
Authors new skills — scaffolding the folder, instructions and examples that teach Claude a repeatable task.
mcp-builder
Open source
Generates MCP servers, wiring a tool or API into something an agent can call directly.
Agent frameworks & patterns
Autonomous agents built to run on your own machine.
Hermes (Nous Research)
Open source
Nous Research’s autonomous agent. It lives on your server, remembers what it learns and grows more capable the longer it runs.
OpenClaw
Open source · Free
An open-source personal assistant that runs on your own machine and automates email, calendar, files and the browser through WhatsApp, Telegram or Discord.
Karpathy’s tools
Andrej Karpathy taught much of the field how neural nets actually work — an OpenAI founding member, formerly director of AI at Tesla, and its clearest teacher. When he shares how he builds, it’s worth copying.
autoresearch
Open source
His loop for autonomous ML research: the agent edits training code, runs short timed experiments and keeps only the changes that move the metric.
LLM wiki
Free
His pattern for AI-maintained knowledge bases: the model builds a cross-linked markdown wiki that compounds as sources and questions accumulate.
Model evaluation
Where I check which model to reach for.
Artificial Analysis
Free
Independent benchmarks that compare models and providers across intelligence, speed and price, so you can pick the right one for a job.
Arena (LMArena)
Free
A crowd-sourced leaderboard that ranks models by blind, side-by-side human votes — millions of them, scored with Elo ratings.
Skill sources
Where Agent Skills come from.
GitHub
Free
Most open Agent Skills ship as a GitHub repo — a folder of instructions, scripts and examples you can read, fork and drop into your own agent.
ClawHub
Free
A skill marketplace for Claude Code and OpenClaw with vector search — the closest thing yet to npm for AI agents.
Notable skills
Individual skills worth borrowing.
retrospective
Free
Artem Zhutov’s /retro. At the end of a session the agent looks back, works out what it learned and writes it down for next time. Skip it and every session starts from zero; run it and the learning compounds across everything you do.
handoff
Free
Artem Zhutov’s /hand-off. A context window fills up and the agent dulls in the last fifth. /hand-off packages the live state — the work, the session, where you are — and passes it clean to a fresh agent, so a long task survives the boundary.
skill-management
Free
Artem Zhutov’s approach to growing a skill. Start with everything in one SKILL.md. When that file gets too big, split the parts into workflows and let the main file route to them — so the agent loads only the workflow it needs.
Tufte CSS
Open source · Free
Tools for styling web articles after Edward Tufte’s books — generous sidenotes, tight text-and-figure integration and careful typography.
Tufte data viz (Caylent)
Open source
A Claude Code skill that applies Edward Tufte’s principles to generate clean charts across Recharts, ECharts, Chart.js, matplotlib, Plotly and D3.
grill-me (Matt Pocock)
Open source
From Matt Pocock’s engineering skills. The grill-me skill interviews you about a plan until every branch of the decision tree is resolved.
Figma use (MCP)
Free tier · paid seats
Figma’s MCP server brings designs into the workflow — an agent can read a file’s structure, variables and components, and turn a frame into code.
gbrain
Open source
Garry Tan’s agent brain. Your notes live in a git repo of markdown, and gbrain builds a knowledge graph over them for cited, synthesised answers.
gstack
Open source
Garry Tan’s opinionated Claude Code setup — 23 tools that act as CEO, designer, engineering manager, release manager and QA inside your agent.
Obsidian
Obsidian’s own add-ons for the knowledge base everything else feeds.
Web Clipper
Free
A browser extension that saves any web page as clean markdown straight into your vault, with templates for the metadata you want.
Canvas
Free with Obsidian
An infinite space to research, brainstorm and lay out ideas — notes, images and links arranged side by side on one board.
Sync
From $4/mo
Keeps your vault on every device, end-to-end encrypted, with version history you can roll back.
Publish
From $8/mo
Turns a vault into a website — internal links, graph and all — without touching a static-site setup.
My own skills
Skill suites I build for my own agents. Coming soon on GitHub.
bvest
Coming soon
An investing workflow built as a hedge-fund org chart — macro strategist, analysts, an investment committee and a portfolio manager, each its own seat.
bknow
Coming soon
Knowledge-management skills for Obsidian vaults: filing, frontmatter, backlinks and synthesis across notes.
blook
Coming soon
A data-storytelling engine for charts, tear sheets and reports in the Tufte tradition.
bvoice
Coming soon
A writing pipeline — storyboard, draft, edit and rewrite — that holds a consistent voice from notes to published piece.
bdas
Coming soon
Deal and strategy skills covering the M&A lifecycle, from thesis and fieldwork through to the final report.
brun
Coming soon
Runtime operations for the agent fleet — health checks, cron, skills and repair across the machines.