The 5 AI tools that are actually insane right now
Cursor, Hermes, Obsidian, Perplexity, and NotebookLM. What each one does, what to actually use it for, and where to get it.
I get asked for my stack constantly, so here it is. Five tools doing the heavy lifting right now. The video couldn't fit the detail, so this is what each one actually is, what I'd use it for, and a link to grab it.
1. Cursor
An all-in-one AI coding environment. You can swap between models on the fly, let it autocomplete the code you haven't written yet, and hand it a sentence to have it write entire features for you. It's like having a senior dev sitting next to you at all times, except this one never gets tired of your questions.
Cursor reads your whole project, so what it suggests fits your codebase instead of spitting out generic snippets. You stay in flow and it handles the typing.
Use it for:
- Shipping real software faster, even if you aren't a strong programmer yet.
- Refactoring or debugging a codebase you didn't write.
- Turning a plain-English description into a working feature.
2. Hermes
The top open-source AI agent right now, built by Nous Research and free under an open license. It writes its own skill files, keeps persistent memory across every session, and runs automations in the background on its own. It gets smarter the longer you use it.
The difference from a normal chatbot is the learning loop. Hermes lives on your own machine, remembers how it solved a problem, builds a model of how you work, and reuses all of it next time. Your data stays local, and you can point it at almost any model you want.
Use it for:
- Standing up an agent that remembers your context instead of starting cold every time.
- Automating recurring work in the background, like digests, monitoring, and reports.
- Building a private assistant that learns your projects over weeks.
3. Obsidian
Your AI second brain. Obsidian is a free notes app where everything is plain markdown hosted locally on your own PC, so you own it forever. Create a vault, connect Claude, and it starts building connections between your ideas that you never would have made yourself.
On its own it's a great note-taker. Point an AI at the vault and months of scattered notes turn into a knowledge base you can query, one that surfaces patterns, contradictions, and links across everything you've ever saved.
Use it for:
- A private knowledge base that compounds every day.
- Connecting research, call notes, and ideas into one map you can actually search.
- Feeding an AI months of your own context so its answers sound like they know you.
I wrote a full step-by-step setup for this exact workflow. It's in the Vault under the second brain guide.
4. Perplexity
The best research tool when you need real answers fast. Perplexity searches the web live and cites every source inline, so you skip the pile of results a normal search drowns you in. If you do any kind of professional research, you need this.
It beats a chatbot for research because of the citations. Every answer comes with the receipts attached, so you can check it and quote it without opening a second tab.
Use it for:
- Fast, sourced research you can actually trust and link back to.
- Getting up to speed on a new topic in minutes instead of hours.
- Pulling current facts and figures that a static model would get wrong.
5. NotebookLM
Upload your research papers, reports, contracts, whatever you've got, and NotebookLM turns them into a fully interactive knowledge base. It's the best thinking partner out there because it basically cannot hallucinate. It only knows what you give it.
That constraint is the whole point. Every answer comes from your documents and points back to the exact passage, so nothing gets invented and your whole pile of material becomes instantly searchable.
Use it for:
- Grounded question-and-answer over your own documents with no made-up facts.
- Summarizing dense reports, papers, or contracts in plain language.
- Turning a pile of sources into a single notebook you can interrogate while you study or prep.
