🧰 AI Toolbox
AI tools worth using in 2026
Tools we've tried, stumbled with, and kept—organized by use case. ⭐ Starred = most-used in each category.
🦅 General LLM chat 💻 AI coding assistants 🎨 Image generation 🎬 Video generation 🎙️ Voice / audio 🤖 Agents / automation 🔍 RAG / knowledge bases ⚙️ Models & platforms 📊 Monitoring / eval 📚 Learning resources
🦅 General LLM chat
Daily use: writing, thinking, Q&A, coding
⭐ Claude
free + paid By Anthropic. Best all-around, especially writing and reasoning.
⭐ ChatGPT
free + paid By OpenAI. Biggest ecosystem, most integrations.
Gemini
free + paid By Google. Strong multimodal + Google product integration.
DeepSeek
free Open-source R1 reasoning model approaches o1-level.
Kimi
free Moonshot AI. Long context strength.
Qwen
free By Alibaba. Best-in-class general experience in China.
💻 AI coding assistants
IDE plugins / standalone editors — AI touching your code directly
⭐ Claude Code
paid Official CLI coding agent from Anthropic. Terminal-native.
⭐ Cursor
paid VS Code fork + AI everywhere. Composer for multi-file edits.
Cline
free + BYOK VS Code extension. Autonomous Agent style, fully open source.
GitHub Copilot
paid First mainstream AI completion. Deep GitHub integration.
Continue
free + BYOK VS Code / JetBrains plugin. Fully open source.
Aider
free + BYOK Command-line AI pair programmer. Minimalist.
Bolt.new
free + paid In-browser AI builds you a full web app.
v0
free + paid By Vercel. AI-generated React UI components.
🎨 Image generation
Text-to-image / image-to-image
⭐ Midjourney
paid Best artistic style. Discord + Web.
FLUX
free + paid Black Forest Labs. New open-source, near-MJ quality.
Stable Diffusion
free OG open source. Runs locally, huge community.
DALL·E 3
paid (via ChatGPT) By OpenAI. Best text understanding, integrated in ChatGPT.
Ideogram
free + paid Excels at rendering text (posters, logos).
Recraft
free + paid Vector + AI images. Designer-friendly.
🎬 Video generation
Text-to-video / image-to-video
⭐ Sora
paid (via ChatGPT Plus) By OpenAI. Best physical consistency.
Runway Gen-3
paid Hollywood favorite, good control.
Veo 2
paid By Google. YouTube integration.
Kling
free + paid By Kuaishou. China leader, 2-min videos.
Pika
free + paid Social-oriented, easy to use.
Luma Dream Machine
free + paid Great image-to-video experience.
🎙️ Voice / audio
TTS, voice cloning, transcription, music
🤖 Agents / automation
Let AI complete multi-step tasks autonomously
⭐ Claude Desktop + MCP
free + paid De facto standard for local file / Git / DB control.
Cline
free + BYOK Autonomous Agent that runs commands and edits code.
AutoGen
free By Microsoft. Multi-agent collaboration framework.
LangGraph
free Stateful multi-step orchestration from LangChain.
CrewAI
free + paid Role-oriented multi-agent framework.
Replit Agent
paid One-sentence-to-app online.
🔍 RAG / knowledge bases
Turn your docs into LLM-queryable knowledge
⭐ NotebookLM
free By Google. Easiest—upload files and ask.
LlamaIndex
free De facto RAG framework.
LangChain
free Broadest LLM application framework.
Pinecone
free + paid Hosted vector database.
Weaviate
free + paid Open-source vector database.
Cohere Rerank
paid Retrieval rerank for better RAG recall.
⚙️ Models & platforms
Open-source model access, hosted inference, training
⭐ Hugging Face
free + paid GitHub of open-source AI. Models / datasets / Spaces.
Ollama
free One-click local open-source LLMs.
LM Studio
free GUI version of Ollama. Desktop app.
Together AI
paid Open-source model hosting, fast and cheap.
Replicate
paid One-click run any open-source model.
Modal
paid Serverless GPU, per-second billing.
RunPod
paid GPU cloud rental, cheaper than AWS.
📊 Monitoring / eval
Must-have after launching LLM apps
📚 Learning resources
Free / quality resources for systematic AI learning
⭐ HelloAI Learning Paths
free L0-L7 systematic path (this site).
Karpathy YouTube
free Build GPT, Tokenizer from scratch. Masterclass.
3Blue1Brown Neural Networks
free Best visual intro to deep learning math.
fast.ai
free Top-down practical ML by Jeremy Howard.
Hugging Face NLP Course
free Free NLP + LLM curriculum.
AI Alignment Forum
free Alignment research community.