AI Productivity Workflows

Not all of the useful AI work happens in the editor. This section covers the surrounding workflow: automation platforms, meeting and note tooling, and the general-purpose tools that either earn their subscription or quietly stop getting opened.

The automation comparisons are the ones I get asked about most — n8n against Make against Zapier, judged from a developer's angle rather than a marketing page. The question that matters there is not which has the longest integration list, it is which one you can debug at 11pm when a workflow has silently stopped firing, and which one you can self-host when a client will not put their data through a third party.

The tool round-ups take a deliberately slow approach. A tool that impresses in a demo and a tool that survives six months of real use are rarely the same tool, so where I have run something long enough to have a verdict, I say how long and what changed my mind. Where I have not, I say that instead of padding the list.

This is also where the honest negative results live. Some categories are genuinely solved and worth paying for. Others are still worse than the manual process they claim to replace, and it is more useful to know which is which than to read another list where every entry is excellent.