My A.I stack - February, 2026
Tools come and go. Here's where I've landed on the AI stack - for now.
In:
- Claude as the core (finally feels like a real collaborator)
- Claude Skills (custom instructions that sustain)
- Kling (video that doesn't look (too) AI-generated, and relatively low cost for the output)
- VS Code for product work
- Notion MCP, Figma MCP (the connective tissue)
- Google Nano Banana (image generation)
- ElevenLabs - (voice cloning, voiceovers, background music, also surprisingly good for full video generation)
Testing:
- Julius (data viz without the spreadsheet wrestling)
- Remotion (code-driven video - jury's out)
- AI employees with 'traits' (weird, but promising)
- HeyGen (avatars)
- Cursor (for coding - good, but a little too technical for me, also speaks to me like a disgruntled senior engineer, which I find a little triggering)
- Slides via HTML and CSS (goodbye Figma Slides?)
Out:
- Runway (too uncanny, very high cost for the return)
- ChatGPT (Claude won)
- Descript (audio/video editing - not using enough and Claude and Gemini can do most of what we need)
- Replit (back to VS Code + Claude)
This may well change within the month/week/day.
What have you ditched that everyone else swears by?
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