The 5 AI tools that are actually insane right now

I get asked for my stack constantly, so here it is. Five tools doing the real heavy lifting right now. This is the full breakdown the video couldn't fit: what each one actually is, why it matters, the exact ways I'd use it, 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.

What makes it click is context. Cursor reads your whole project, so its suggestions actually fit your codebase instead of spitting out generic snippets. You stay in flow, 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 genuinely 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, not minutes.

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. The magic is pointing an AI at the vault. Months of scattered notes turn into a queryable knowledge base that surfaces patterns, contradictions, and links across everything you've ever saved.

Use it for:

• A private knowledge base that compounds every single 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 in real time, cites every source inline, and cuts through the noise that a normal search drowns you in. If you do any kind of professional research, you need this.

The reason it beats a chatbot for research is the citations. You're not trusting a confident guess, you're getting an answer with the receipts attached, so you can verify it and quote it without a second tab open.

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 is grounded in your documents and points back to the exact passage it came from. No invented facts, no confident nonsense, just your material made instantly searchable and explainable.

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.