The AI and Writing Tools I Actually Use: The Workshop

These are the tools this site is actually made with. Not the tools I have read about, or mean to try. If something is on this page, it is because I used it this week.

I write about AI elsewhere on this site. Hiding the tools I write with would be strange. So here they are, in the order the work moves through them.

Writing and thinking

Claude, used through Claude Code. The drafting engine, and the thing most people mean when they ask what I write with. I design the argument, decide what is true, edit and verify. The machine does the drudgery of drafting and organizing. The full account of that division of labor, and the reasons for it, is on the method page.
Obsidian. My notes are a folder of plain text files. Obsidian is how I read and move through them. Pages link to each other, a map shows how everything connects, and a few labels on each page let me search across all of it. It sits over the files rather than owning them, which is exactly why I trust it.
Plain text files, with every version kept. The least glamorous entry and the most important one. Every page of my notes and every essay on this site is an ordinary text file, the kind any program on any computer can open. Underneath them sits a tool called git, which keeps a copy of every change I have ever made to any of them, so I can read a paragraph as it stood a year ago. Nothing is locked inside a format only one company can open, and no company’s shutdown notice can take any of it from me.

Reading and checking

Readwise Reader. Where drafts and long documents go so I can listen to them on the phone and mark them up, then have the highlights, comments and notes come back into the file they came from. It is the reason review actually happens in a full week rather than waiting for a quiet one.
Scite. For checking how a paper has actually been cited, rather than whether it exists. Citation counts tell you a paper was noticed; smart citations tell you whether later work supported it or contradicted it, which is the question that matters before I lean on a finding.

Making the site

Astro. Astro builds this site into finished pages ahead of time. Every page you read was written out before you asked for it, so nothing is assembling itself while you wait and there is nothing running behind it. Pages arrive here from my notes by a small program that runs the same way every time. Nothing on the site is written on the site.
kie.ai. The images and the video on the home page were generated through kie.ai. Every one of them is meant to carry the argument rather than decorate it, and none of them is a photograph of something that happened.

Behind the writing

beancount. The books for the businesses behind this writing are kept in beancount, a ledger that lives in an ordinary text file. Every dollar gets recorded twice, once where it came from and once where it went, which is what makes the books check themselves. Same principle as the notes: plain files, every change kept, readable in twenty years.

Disclosure

No link on this page is an affiliate link today, and nothing here earns me anything today. I intend to set some up, and when I do, this line will name which links pay me and the site will earn a small commission when you sign up through one. The rule does not change with the money: no tool will ever be listed here because of a commission. A tool is listed here because I use it, and a tool I stop using comes off the page whether it pays or not.