My Weekly 10-Minute AI Tool Audit (The Habit That Keeps My Stack Honest)
Stacks grow by accident and shrink by audit. Ten minutes every Friday keeps the tools earning their place, with three questions per tool.
Every AI stack drifts toward bloat because adding a tool takes a minute and removing one takes a decision. My counterweight is a Friday audit: ten minutes, three questions per tool, no mercy. It has kept my stack at six tools for a year while my tried-list passed three hundred.
Question one for each tool: what did this do for me this week, specifically? Not ever, this week. The answer has to name an artifact: the transcript it made, the image it generated, the bug it caught. Tools that pass this question for eight consecutive weeks are infrastructure. Tools that fail it twice in a row go on notice.
Question two: what would I actually do without it? If the answer is 'nothing, I would just not do that thing,' the tool is supporting a task that does not deserve to exist, which is worth knowing even if you keep it. If the answer is 'spend an hour doing it manually,' the tool is earning real money at my hourly rate.
Question three, the one that catches subscription creep: am I using this on its free tier limits, its paid tier, or barely either? Tools sitting in paid-tier-paying-but-lightly-used are the most common leak I find. Downgrade, pause, or cancel, and most vendors make the pause easy precisely because they know return rates are high.
The audit takes ten minutes because the notes live in the same file as everything else, one line per tool per week. The real product is not the cancellations, though those are nice. It is that I can answer 'what is your stack and why' without flinching, which turns out to be rarer than any individual tool.