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F2F #15: My AI stack

This is my AI stack as of December 2024. What's yours?

F2F #15: My AI stack
Photo by Solen Feyissa / Unsplash

To say that AI has changed my life for the better is quite an understatement.

It has transformed the way I work, enabling me to do more, better and compensating for my weaknesses: it readproofs and corrects my mistakes, it helps me to do the last 10% I always got stuck in and it also helps me to get rid of the blank canvas syndrome.

It has also helped me to do better with personal stuff. My backlog is being ploughed through more often and I seem to spend more time with more meaningful things, outsourcing the tedious ones.

After two years using AI daily, this is my most consolidated AI-stack so far. It will become outdated in a few months (if not weeks), so use it carefully:

Search: Perplexity

It has become my de-facto "ask anything" tool. Whereas before I'd open a Google Chrome tab, type a query and spend minutes - sometimes hours - clicking on and browsing through dozens of results, now I open a tab, ask Perplexity and get an answer in seconds. In 90% of the cases, I get what I want under 5 seconds, close the tab and continue with what I was doing.

To do this, I enabled Perplexity as my default search engine on Chrome:

Chrome settings
Do this and you'll never go back

20 years ago, Google reduced our search time from hours to minutes. Prior to Google, we'd go to internet directories, like Yahoo, or through our bookmarks, or to even more archaic solutions like Encarta or libraries. Perplexity reduces it from minutes to seconds.

Perplexity is still lagging behind in certain things, like image search or the fact that it can't reproduce stuff literally, so you won't be able to get that Taylor Swift lyrics on Perplexity, Joshua, without having to visit the website where they're contained, but it's a great trade-off.

Nowadays, you can get a free Pro subscription through many services. I got mine through my paid Revolut account. Here's a referral code to get Perplexity PRO and here's my Revolut affiliate signup link, in case you're interested.

All-around: ChatGPT

Even if it's been displaced as my go-to AI tool, I still use it for pretty much everything.

For work, I wrote ChatGPT for founders a few weeks ago. So I am not going to expand on that. And I will also write a blog post of personal uses I give to ChatGPT to help me manage my personal life differently.

Since I wrote that blog post, I installed the native MacOS app so I can invoke ChatGPT with a keyboard shortcut to eliminate almost every friction.

I know ChatGPT and Perplexity overlap in a lot of things, but my rationale is:

  • For quick questions that I need answered instantly: Perplexity.
  • For factual research (lots of back and forth refining the query): Perplexity.
  • For everything else: ChatGPT.

The main reasons for this distrubution is that Perplexity is more factual and to-the-point, while ChatGPT is great at having more context and treat threads as projects where lots of different tasks are involved: transcribing audio, editing images, reading files, etc.

Video: Capcut

I use Capcut for video and audio editing. While not a native-AI app, Capcut uses AI for a lot of things, like audio filtering, filler-word removal, creating shorts/reels from long-form videos, adding artificial lightning and much more.

The Life on Mars podcast has video, so I need the video-editing capabilities but also ideas for content, titles, and more. Capcut is a great all-in-one suite.

Here's an invite to try Capcut.

Audio: Auphonic

For audio, I use Auphonic. I edit the audio on Capcut, but I run the output through Auphonic to give it an extra layer of editing so the final audio file has pristine quality.

Auphonic presets
Auphonic presets

Chores: Anything

I use a virtual assistant application called Anything. I have been using it for almost a year now and it's great. I have outsourced my finances, groceries, logistics, restaurant booking and much more.

It works like this: you send your tasks via a chat interface and the app breaks them down between tasks that can be done by AI and tasks that require a human.

I think they're still on closed beta, so hit me up if you want to try it.

Content: NotebookLM

Google released this powerful "turn stuff into a podcast episode" tool called NotebookLM that most people overlooked.

I am not a fan of audiobooks. I don't enjoy the experience because books are too immersive and I lose context because I am always doing something else while I listen to shit. That's why I do podcasts instead: they provide a better semi-distracted experience.

But sometimes I have got very long articles to read that I never find the time to consume properly, in focus mode, so I turn them into podcast episodes.

For example, this article called Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan promises to be VERY interesting but I doubt I can sit on my laptop for half an hour to read it. It actually might disappoint me halfway through.

Instead of focusing on reading it, I turn it into a podcast episode, listen to it while walking and learn the essentials. If it is really interesting, I might then decide to read it through with full attention and detail, but this rarely ever happens.

Coding: Cursor

Cursor is my pick for coding. Its ability to send parts of the code or send the whole codebase as context for each specific AI request makes it give very good feedback.

It feels like you're pair programming with someone, as you have a chat right up next to your code, forcing you to converse with it. In doing so, I line up my thoughts more properly, and sometimes I'm coming up with the answer as I am typing the prompt, so I end up not prompting in a lot of the cases.

As per usual, I'm sharing a list of stuff I'd like to share with you. This time around it's shorter because the content above is longer!

Until next Friday!