Category
Honest reviews and tutorials for ChatGPT, Notion AI, Claude, and the rest of the modern AI stack.
25 posts
This section covers the AI tools we actually use day-to-day — not every product that gets a press release. The focus is on three questions: Does it work? What does it cost in real terms? Who is it actually for?
We split AI tools into four buckets:
If you're new to AI tools, read the best free AI tools roundup first — it costs nothing to test, and you'll get a feel for which interfaces match your workflow before you pay for anything. From there, the ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini comparison helps you pick a paid tool with confidence.
For a working setup, see AI productivity apps — that's the stack we actually run, with the costs and the trade-offs.
If you're more interested in how to use AI than which AI, jump to Productivity for workflow guides, or Automation for connecting AI tools to the rest of your stack.
ChatGPT can write formulas, clean messy columns, and explain what a confusing formula does. The catch nobody mentions: it can't see your sheet, so it guesses your layout. Here's how I prompt around that.
Jun 19, 2026
Everyone keeps saying 'AI agents' like you already know what they mean. Here's the honest, no-jargon version: what an agent actually is, how it's different from a chatbot or a Zapier automation, and where they're genuinely useful today versus where you still shouldn't fully trust them.
Jun 19, 2026
Distorted faces, garbled text, the same boring style over and over — Midjourney has a recognizable set of failure modes. Here's the troubleshooting guide I built after running into every one of them.
Jun 9, 2026
AI humanizers promise to turn robotic AI text into writing that 'passes as human' and slips past detectors. I ran a bunch of them through real detectors to see what actually happens. The results are messier than either the humanizer sellers or the detector sellers want you to believe.
Jun 5, 2026
Most 'best AI tools for students' lists are written by people who've never sat through a 9am lecture hungover. This one separates the tools that genuinely help you learn from the ones that just help you cheat badly and get caught. Tested, ranked, and honest about the risks.
Jun 5, 2026
If you've waited 30 seconds for Notion AI to summarize a single paragraph, you're not alone. After hitting the same problem and spending too long debugging it, here are the five fixes that actually moved the needle.
Jun 5, 2026
It always happens at the worst possible moment. You're mid-prompt, you hit send, and ChatGPT gives you the dreaded red error or just stares back at you blankly. Here are the 8 errors I've actually run into, with the fixes that work.
Jun 2, 2026
I gave 12 AI writing tools the same five assignments — a blog post, a sales email, a LinkedIn post, an essay, and a tricky technical doc. Here's the honest ranking, including the ones nobody talks about that quietly outperformed the famous names.
May 29, 2026
I added up what I was spending on AI tools last month and it was $94. That felt like too much for one person, so I went through each subscription and asked a simple question: would I notice if this disappeared tomorrow? Here's what survived the cut and what didn't.
May 28, 2026
Most small business owners I talk to know they 'should be using AI' but have no idea where to start. Here are seven concrete ways I've watched real owners use ChatGPT to save hours a week — with the actual prompts and outputs.
May 26, 2026
Perplexity sends more clicks to stackjot than ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini combined. After eight weeks of testing what gets cited and what gets ignored, here is the short list of things that actually work — and the longer list of advice that sounds smart but does nothing.
May 23, 2026
Everyone gives you the same vague answer: 'a few days to a few weeks.' That wasn't my experience. I kept a daily log of a brand-new site from launch through its first organic impressions, including the parts that felt broken but weren't. Here's the real timeline.
May 19, 2026
GA4 doesn't have an 'AI search' category. It probably won't add one anytime soon. Here's the actual setup I use to see how many people are landing on stackjot from ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Gemini — and the honest limits of what this data can tell you.
May 19, 2026
Your pages are in Google. Bing knows you exist. ClaudeBot has crawled the site. And ChatGPT still doesn't mention you when someone asks it the exact question your post answers. Here's what's actually going on, based on six weeks of testing this on a small site that was getting impressions but zero AI citations.
May 17, 2026
I've tried over 80 free AI tools in the last year. Most are demo-ware or upsell traps. These 15 are the ones I came back to — the ones that genuinely save me time without ever asking for a credit card.
May 15, 2026
Half the marketing world is panicking that SEO is dead. The other half says AEO is just SEO with a new acronym. Both are wrong. Here's the honest, side-by-side breakdown of what AEO is, where it overlaps with SEO, and how to budget your time between them in 2026.
May 14, 2026
Google rankings used to be the whole game. Now half of your future readers will discover you through ChatGPT, Claude, or Perplexity — not a search results page. Here's what actually moves the needle in AI search in 2026, based on six months of testing on a real site.
May 13, 2026
I've paid for Grammarly Premium for six years straight. Last month I cancelled it, replaced it with ChatGPT, and tracked what actually changed. The answer surprised me — and probably won't be the same for you.
May 8, 2026
I paid for all three for one month and used each to write the same five marketing assets. The results changed my mind about which one is actually worth paying for — and which one most people don't need at all.
May 4, 2026
I switched between all three for a full month, using each as my primary AI assistant for ten days. Same tasks, same prompts, same workflows. Here's what I actually noticed — including the surprises that didn't show up in any benchmark.
Apr 29, 2026
Midjourney looks intimidating. The Discord interface, the slash commands, the 200-word prompts everyone shares on Twitter. None of that is necessary to start. Here's the actual short path from zero to a great image.
Apr 25, 2026
Both can write. Both can summarize. Both cost about $20/month. But after using each daily for three months, the right choice depends on one thing most people miss.
Apr 22, 2026
I've built 14 custom GPTs over the last year. The first one took two hours and was useless. The most recent one took 12 minutes and I use it every single day. Here's the difference.
Apr 18, 2026
Reading a 40-page PDF before a meeting used to mean an hour of skimming. Now it's a 30-second drag-and-drop. Here's the exact way I use Notion AI to compress long documents into something I can actually use.
Apr 15, 2026
Most people use ChatGPT wrong. They treat it like Google. The result is generic answers and wasted time. Here are 10 prompt techniques that consistently produce 10x better output.
Apr 12, 2026