The AI tool that finally stuck (after I quit twelve)
I download AI tools the way other people buy kitchen gadgets. One finally earned a permanent spot, and it was not the flashy one.
My bookmarks folder is a graveyard of AI apps I used twice. Each promised to change how I work; none survived the third week. The pattern was always the same: cool demo, confusing daily use.
The one that stayed is boring. It does one job - turns a meeting transcript into a short, dated summary with action items - and it does it where I already am. No new dashboard to check, no ritual to remember.
I think the lesson is unglamorous: tools stick when they sit inside a habit you already have, not when they ask you to build a new one. The flashy standalone app loses to the small helper in your existing flow.
So I stopped hunting for the next big thing and started asking which of my daily annoyances is worth automating by one point. That question killed most of my installs.