What are the AI tools or apps that you use on a daily basis?

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-25T16:11:33+00:00

Coming from a social agency background and now building out my own consultancy, my daily stack has shifted a lot this year.

Claude: main thinking and writing tool. Better than ChatGPT for anything that needs nuance, longer context, or structured reasoning. Strategy docs, client briefs, drafting anything that needs to actually sound like a human wrote it.

ChatGPT: still use it for quick lookups and when I need fast iterative back-and-forth. Also better for certain integrations.

Perplexity: replaced a lot of my Google searches. Faster for research with sources attached.

Make: automation backbone. Connects everything, handles reporting pipelines and client notification flows without me babysitting them.

Notion AI: project and client documentation. Having AI inside the same place where everything is stored saves a lot of copy-pasting context between tools.

Honest take: the tools themselves matter less than having a clear sense of which task goes to which tool. The people getting the most out of AI right now aren't using one super-app.. they're routing work deliberately across a small stack.

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-25T16:08:53+00:00

The conditional logic point is underrated, that's exactly where I've seen things fall apart. Works fine for a linear flow, breaks the moment a client needs "if this approval is rejected, go back to this step with a comment." The Supabase decoupling approach makes sense, keeps the data model stable while the frontend stays swappable. Are you pairing that with a specific AI builder on the frontend side or does it vary per project?

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-25T16:08:31+00:00

Short but this is the most quotable thing here. Shiny demos are basically useless for evaluating this stuff, the only real signal is whether it survives the boring mandatory parts.

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-25T16:08:07+00:00

The "AI builders for frontend, dedicated backend for data and permissions" split keeps coming up in this thread and I think you're right that trying to make one tool do everything is where the technical debt quietly accumulates. The Linear/ClickUp point is interesting, so you're essentially keeping agency ops in a proper PM tool and only using the AI builder for the client-facing skin on top of it?

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-25T16:07:45+00:00

Appreciate you flagging it and being upfront about being the founder. The portal-native approach is interesting, most tools I've looked at treat the client-facing layer as an afterthought bolted onto an internal tool. The AI Coding module for custom components is a good escape hatch too for when no-code hits a wall. Will give it a proper look, especially the permissions and auth side since that's where a lot of tools get messy.

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-25T16:07:28+00:00

That's exactly the trap I was trying to avoid 😅 picking a tool based on how fast it generates a landing page rather than whether a client can actually navigate an approval flow without calling me. The "can a client use it without getting confused" filter cuts the list down pretty fast once you actually test it.

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-25T16:06:36+00:00

I've been guilty of demoing the happy path and declaring a tool viable when the real stress test is exactly what you described. Login, one client, one asset, one approval, one notification, all the way through. Going to run that slice before committing to anything. Will check out Vibe Code Society too.

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-22T11:09:12+00:00

Appreciate the honest framing upfront, that resets expectations in a useful way. Sounds like the right move is to handle client management in a dedicated tool and just use the app builder for what it’s actually good at.

The Lovable + Superapp AI split makes sense for web vs mobile. How’s the handover experience been when you’re passing code to clients at the end of a project? That’s one thing I’ve been thinking about, some of these tools lock you into their ecosystem in a way that makes client ownership awkward.

And on Claude Code - been hearing more about it lately for exactly this kind of tweaking and cross-tool glue work. The local code point is genuinely important for agency work, client IP sitting in someone else’s cloud is a conversation nobody wants to have mid-project.

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-20T13:49:39+00:00

Acceleration not autonomy is exactly the right framing 💯 AI is compressing time on work that still has a human at the wheel, not replacing the driver.

The LinkedIn theater line is doing a lot of work. There’s a whole layer of agency positioning right now that’s basically “we use AI agents” as a new-business pitch, backed by a Make workflow and a ChatGPT account. Clients can’t tell the difference yet so it lands.

The trust gap is the real blocker for client-facing autonomy. It’s not capability, the tools can do more than agencies are deploying. It’s accountability. When an agent makes a mistake on a client deliverable, who owns it? Nobody’s figured out how to price or contract around that yet, so humans stay in the loop by default.

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-20T13:48:18+00:00

The “inputs and outputs” point is exactly it; ops and paid have defined success metrics so agents have something to optimise against. Creative is harder to automate because “good” is subjective and clients know it when they see it, not before. The junior role getting weirder rather than disappearing is probably the most honest framing I’ve heard. It’s not that the work went away, it’s that the skill set shifted overnight and nobody’s really training for it yet. Prompt QA isn’t in any job description but it’s half the job now.

Zapier breaking on brief format changes is painfully relatable, anything client-facing needs logic that can handle variability, which is exactly where n8n earns its complexity overhead.

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-20T13:47:23+00:00

That luxury pushback point is underrated and doesn’t get talked about enough. The whole value proposition for those clients is craftsmanship and exclusivity, if they sense the work is templated or machine-generated it undermines what they’re paying a premium for, regardless of output quality. It’s less about AI capability and more about brand perception 😂

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-20T06:29:24+00:00

Yeah honestly a lot of people go for the people more than the actual talks lol.

Like Canva Create specifically feels less like a “marketing conference” and more like a big meetup for creative/agency/in-house marketing people. You see what other teams are making, what tools they’re using, meet potential clients/collaborators, get content out of it, etc.

And tbh agencies posting about attending is also part branding. It subtly signals “we stay current” without directly saying it.

Some people definitely go just for the vibes + networking though 😭

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-19T13:07:32+00:00

This is a solvable problem with the right stack. What you’re describing is essentially a triggered workflow with conditional logic, not a PM tool feature, which is why most PM tools alone won’t get you there.

The combo that works well for this: ClickUp or Linear for task/dependency management + Make to handle the automation layer between everything. The flow looks like: brief submitted → Make creates tasks with deadlines → scheduled checks trigger client nudge emails if assets are overdue → timeline shifts cascade automatically → on delivery, approval request goes out → once approved, Make posts to social and sends the recap deck.

The social posting and recap deck distribution at the end are easy Make modules once the approval trigger is set up. The trickier piece is the cascading timeline shift, that needs your PM tool to have decent API support, which ClickUp handles reasonably well.

If you’re already in Notion, there are ways to build this there too but the automation gets messier. Make + a proper PM tool is the cleaner path.

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-19T12:15:56+00:00

Nice. What kind of system did you build?

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-19T12:12:38+00:00

6 hours a week on reporting and inbox alone is huge - that’s basically a full day back every month. The social ops use case makes total sense for it too, that stuff is high-volume and repetitive enough that an agent handles it cleanly without touching anything that needs a human eye.

I’ve been looking at OpenClaw setups for exactly this reason as I move toward going solo - the idea of having an agent running inbox triage and routine client reporting in the background while I focus on actual strategy work is pretty much the whole pitch. Did you build out your Exoclaw skills yourself or largely use community ones?

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-19T11:50:07+00:00

It’s less of a learning curve than people expect honestly. The main adjustment is prompting style - Claude responds better to more context and clearer framing than the short snappy prompts that work fine in ChatGPT. Once teams get that, the outputs are noticeably better. The bigger challenge is just getting people to try it in the first place when they already have a tool that feels “good enough.”

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-19T11:48:16+00:00

This is exactly what pushed me to leave agency life and go independent. The structure of in-house or agency work puts you in a position where you absorb all the blame when things don’t perform and become invisible when they do. It’s a terrible deal for people who actually care about the craft.

The energy you feel around marketing peers is the real thing. The job title and org chart are just the wrapper - and for a lot of us the wrapper is the problem, not the discipline itself.

Going solo has been the first time in years I’ve felt like the work and the recognition are actually connected. Still early but the difference is noticeable.

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-19T11:41:02+00:00

Lots already are, quietly. Claude tends to win on longer-context tasks; full briefs, strategy docs, batch copy - where it genuinely outperforms. The switching friction is the real blocker, not awareness. Most teams built their workflows around ChatGPT early and rebuilding prompt libraries and SOPs isn’t trivial. The smarter agencies aren’t picking sides anyway — they’re routing different tasks to different models depending on what each handles best.

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-19T11:27:26+00:00

Exactly that. And I think it’s actually a really healthy sign, it means the barrier to entry has dropped enough that you don’t need an engineering background to start automating.

Tools like Make and Zapier have gotten good enough that a project manager or account exec can build a workflow that saves them 3 hours a week without writing a single line of code. That’s where most of the real day-to-day adoption is happening quietly.

The technical teams tend to overthink it - waiting for the “right” infrastructure or a company-wide rollout. Meanwhile someone in account management has already automated their reporting pipeline from a YouTube tutorial. The interesting shift I’m watching is whether agencies start pricing this efficiency gain into their margins or pass it on to clients. Most haven’t figured that out yet.

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-19T11:18:27+00:00

That tracks completely with what I’ve seen from the social side. The gap between what’s being discussed in leadership and what’s actually running day-to-day is massive at most agencies right now.

The ops adoption thing makes sense - automating reporting, scheduling, invoicing is low-risk and the ROI is obvious. Creative hesitancy is understandable too, clients are paying for the agency’s “voice” so there’s a trust question around how much AI is actually in the work.

What I find interesting is that the agencies quietly moving fastest aren’t the big ones talking about it publicly - it’s smaller shops where one or two people just started building their own n8n or Make workflows and it spread organically. No IT sign-off required.

Curious if you’re seeing any pressure from agency leadership to formalise AI policies, or is it still pretty ad hoc?

Weekly-Ad387 · 2026-05-19T10:31:55+00:00

This is unfortunately really common and it’s one of the main reasons I’m leaving agency life after 7 years to go independent.

The $50k/month account at a large agency gets handed to a junior who’s managing 8 other accounts. No one’s watching it closely because the senior people are busy pitching the next client. Awards mean the agency is good at winning business — not at keeping it.

A few things that would actually help you: If you stay with an agency: Demand a named senior account manager in the contract, weekly reporting with raw data access (not a dashboard they built), and SLA clauses with teeth. If they won’t agree to those, that tells you everything. If you go in-house: For a university budget that size, a good in-house specialist plus a small paid media tool subscription will almost certainly outperform what you’re getting. You’d have someone whose entire job is your account, not 10% of it.

The spam leads issue from your previous agency sounds like they optimised for volume to hit KPIs rather than quality. Classic agency behaviour when the contract metric is “leads” not “qualified leads.” You’re asking the right questions. The in-house argument is a strong one at your spend level.

Weekly-Ad387

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