Issue 001 — the tool I built to find better tools
I've found (and built) dozens of tools in the last few months. So many things, so little time. The problem (the "moat" is a term being used a lot) is nobody can find them.
Every week I'll find the tools worth using — for your work, your day, and the parts of life that should run a little smoother. The stuff that’s useful for regular people, not the techies. No hype, no affiliate links. Just good tools, explained in plain English and why you should pay attention to them. Plus occasionally, what I built.
I made the newsletter before I knew it was a newsletter. Here's what that means: I have friends who don’t even know where to start when it comes to AI and what kinds of things can help them in their daily lives. And exponentially, more and more tools are being built every day with no end in sight. I, on the other hand, spend most of my free time on the lookout for the next best thing. I spend a gross amount of time on the internet. I want to be the filter for everyday people.
It started this as a prompt in Claude:
I thought it would initially be a browsable web app that people could go find what they need. The issue with that is there’s too much to see. There’s no opinion or point of view. Just an algorithm telling you what you think you might want to see. I want to be that point of view. And a lot of these circles are very tech-centric. Tech people talking to other tech people, which creates this growing barrier between the techies and everyone else.
So, I’m putting my journalistic experience to use in a way that makes sense to me — as a newsletter.
(The other reason this exists is I just missing writing. Writing words on a page is such an exercise in clarity that filters out all the junk I consume on a daily basis)
The Good Tools
Clicky
An AI tool that turns your mouse cursor into a chatbot (or voicebot, depending on what you’re into)
.Why you should care
This feels like the next frontier in consumer (read: AI for normal people) AI. Something that just fades into the background. I tried it out and it’s got some small bugs but it’s really promising. I think the biggest hurdle for widespread adoption is the privacy hurdle. Clicky basically records your screen as you move around so it can give you feedback at a moments notice. As you can imagine, you probably don’t want sensitive information up where it can see — even if they’re not doing anything nefarious.
Most people are used to interacting with a chat interface inside of ChatGPT or CoPilot, etc., but what if the chat interface was anywhere and everywhere you were?
PoweredByWho
A tool that tracks the AI data center boom in the U.S.
Why you should care
Data centers, for the uninitiated, are massive buildings filled with data servers that are being quickly constructed around the country (and the world). They process unfathomable amounts of data that powers the internet.
They’re coming under lots of scrutiny for the amount of power and water they use, construction complications, and other environmental impacts. PoweredByWho tracks all the construction the politics for these projects across the U.S. It’s something that will likely affect lots of normal people very soon if they haven’t already.
Claude
I know, I know. You already know what this is. But I want to share one interesting way I’ve been using it. It does a great job at parsing meeting transcripts. I have a yearly review coming up and I wanted to measure my impact. As a designer this is sometimes hard to do for various reasons. Here’s what I asked Claude:
Quite surprisingly, it not only gave me some very clear bullet points but also cited some specific examples where I shifted the conversation to tangibly improve the UX and get people to think a bit differently about it, which for a designer is a great way of showing your impact.
I then asked if they could make it more quantitative, and it suggested some things I could tally (that weren’t part of the transcript) and counted the number of proposed design changes that were accepted by the group to improve the UX and push the project forward.
This newsletter is honest a joy to write. If it’s helpful to you, let me know. If there’s anything you’ve been curious about, let me know. If you hate it, also let me know.