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
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
Coding agent
Claude Code
Anthropic’s agentic coding tool — terminal, IDE or web, carrying a task from request to a shipped change. It’s the stronger coder for me. One catch: the subscription only powers Claude Code itself. To drive other agents you drop down to the pay-per-token API, which adds up fast.
Pro $20/mo · Max $100 or $200/mo — for real work you’ll want at least Max
Coding agent
Codex
OpenAI’s coding agent for terminal, IDE and web. Its quiet advantage: the same ChatGPT plan can power other agents too — OpenClaw and Hermes can run on your Codex subscription, where Claude Code would bill you separately through the API. On sharing a plan, Codex wins.
Plus $20/mo · Pro $100 or $200/mo — the $100 Pro tier is enough to run agents on your plan
Hardware
These coding agents run in a terminal, so you need a real computer — a phone or iPad can’t drive them. I’m Apple-pilled, but it’s close to consensus now that Apple Silicon is the best consumer hardware for AI work. If you’re buying for the next few years, 32GB of memory is the new floor; with a Pro chip and 64GB or more you can run small language models on the machine itself and stop paying for tokens.
Mac mini
From $599
The cheapest way in, and a natural always-on box to leave on your desk. Spec the memory up rather than the looks.
MacBook Air
From $999
Possibly the best deal in tech right now, and plenty for driving agents on the move. It’s fanless, though, so it throttles under the sustained heat of running models locally — for that, you want the Pro.
MacBook Pro
From $1,599
The one to buy if you genuinely want to run models on-device. The fan is the point — it cools the chip through sustained inference, where the Air would throttle. Pair an M-series Pro chip with 64GB+ and a chunk of the work costs nothing per token.
Desktop & menu-bar tools
Small native apps that keep an agent fleet in view.
CodexBar
Open source · Free
Usage limits, credit balances and reset countdowns for Codex, Claude Code and 40+ AI coding providers, all from the macOS menu bar.
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.
Claude Code commands
The built-in commands that come with Claude Code, and what I use each one for.
/plan
Built in
Researches the codebase and lays out an approach before changing anything. You approve the plan, then it executes. Toggle it with Shift+Tab.
/goal
Built in
Set a finish line and it keeps working across turns, checking after each one, until the condition is met.
/workflows
Built in
Watch and manage a workflow — a script that runs many subagents in parallel — as it works in the background.
/loop
Built in
Runs a prompt on a repeating interval, or paces its own iterations when you leave the timing to it.
/agents
Built in
Defines subagents you can hand specialised work to, each with its own tools and instructions.
/rewind
Built in
Rolls the code and the conversation back to an earlier checkpoint when a path turns out wrong.
Design & image generation
Where I go to make images and mock up designs.
ChatGPT Images 2.0
Image gen in ChatGPT · Plus from $20/mo
My favourite image generator now. It follows a detailed brief closely and lets you edit a picture conversationally until it’s right.
Google AI Studio
Free tier
Google’s playground for Gemini, including the Nano Banana image model — strong at editing a picture and holding a subject steady across generations.
Figma Make
Free tier · Pro from $16/seat/mo (AI credits)
Figma’s AI generation tool. Describe an interface and it builds a working prototype you can edit by hand — the part of Figma I keep coming back to.
Local tools & utilities
Smaller tools I reach for around the agents.
Ollama
Open source · Free
Runs small language models on your own machine. With enough memory you keep routine work local and off the token meter.
Playwright
Open source · Free
Drives a real browser from code — clicking, typing, screenshotting. It’s how the agents capture pages and check their own work.
Marker
Open source
Turns PDFs, slides and documents into clean markdown the agents can read — tables, structure and all.
birdclaw
Open source
Steipete’s local-first tool for your X account. It pulls your tweets, DMs, likes and bookmarks into a database you own, with a web view to search, read and post.
Agent frameworks & patterns
Autonomous agents I run on a server that stays on.
Hermes (Nous Research)
Open source
Nous Research’s autonomous agent. I run it for vault maintenance — filing, organising and keeping my Obsidian notes in order on a schedule.
OpenClaw
Open source · Free
An open-source personal assistant that runs on your own machine. I run it for information capture — watching feeds, email and the browser and pulling what matters into one place.
Hosted server
~€15/mo · 8GB RAM, 80GB
Where both agents live. You need your own server so they’re always on — I don’t keep a computer running and online around the clock, so I rent a Hetzner box. Aim for the 8GB RAM, 80GB tier — enough headroom for the agents and their state.
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 · Pro from $12/seat/mo
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 apps and plugins
The add-ons and plugins I run on top of the vault.
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.
Sync
$8/mo
I run the $8 Sync plan to keep my vaults in step — from the server down to the Mac, and across every device — end-to-end encrypted, with version history I can roll back.
Dataview
Open source
Turns your notes into a queryable database — list, table and task views generated live from frontmatter and inline fields.
Excalidraw
Open source
Hand-drawn diagrams and sketches you draw straight inside a note, kept alongside the writing.
Bases
Free with Obsidian
Obsidian’s built-in way to turn a folder of notes into a database view — filter, sort and group without leaving the vault.
Graph
Free with Obsidian
The graph view — every note a node, every link an edge, so the shape of what you know is something you can see.
Data connections
Free data feeds I wire into the investing work.
Yahoo Finance
Free
Free market data — quotes, history and fundamentals — easy to pull for a quick look or a chart.
FRED
Free
The St. Louis Fed’s economic database: hundreds of thousands of macro series, free, and my first stop for rates, inflation and growth.
Financial Modeling Prep
Free tier
Real-time quotes and 30+ years of fundamentals over a clean API. The free tier covers a lot before you ever pay.
People I follow on X
The accounts I learn the most from.
My skill families
Families of skills I’ve built for my workflows. Past a certain number, I find them easier to manage grouped into families. 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 design-output engine. It routes brand tokens into charts and tear sheets, then exports to HTML and drives PowerPoint and Word through scripts — everything coming out on-brand.
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.