The Problem With Most "Best AI Tools" Lists (They're Written By Marketers)
Most "best AI tools for indie hackers" posts are written by people who have never shipped anything.
They're written by content teams chasing affiliate commissions, by SEO agencies optimizing for clicks, by people who installed a tool, poked around for 20 minutes, and declared it life-changing. The lists are long. The recommendations are safe. And they will not help you build a real project.
I'm writing this as someone running actual projects — Shy Car (car listing automation), 1 Yr Net (habit tracking), Simply Lawn (a no-code directory), and Goals Made Easy (a productivity bot). I've used AI in all of them. Some of it was transformative. Some of it was a waste of three hours and $29.
This is the real breakdown of AI tools for indie hackers in 2026. What I pay for, what I dumped, and the one category where AI genuinely changed what I can build alone.
AI for Building: Research, Prototyping, and Validating Ideas
This is where AI earns its keep for me.
The fastest use case: idea validation before you build. I used Claude to work through the Shy Car concept before writing a line of code (or, in my case, a line of Make.com logic). I described the problem, the target user, the automation flow I was imagining. The conversation surfaced three edge cases I hadn't considered. That saved me from building the wrong thing.
For prototyping, AI is useful in two specific ways:
- Drafting the structure of an automation flow (what triggers what, where data goes)
- Writing regex patterns, simple scripts, or API payload structures that I don't want to look up from scratch
What it's not good for: understanding your market better than you can from talking to 10 real people. AI will confidently tell you your idea is good. Your first 10 potential users will tell you the truth.
Tools I actually use for this:
- Claude (Anthropic) — my primary thinking partner. Good at structured reasoning, less prone to making things up than I expected.
- Perplexity — for research that needs sources. For "what are the current API rate limits on X" type questions it's faster than a browser.
AI for Automating the Boring Stuff (So You Can Build More)
This overlaps with my full automation stack, so I'll keep it short here: AI as a processing layer inside an automation is where it's genuinely earned.
For Shy Car, the automation pulls raw car listing data (inconsistent formatting, missing fields, mixed sources) and passes it to a language model with a structured prompt. The model normalizes the data and writes a short listing summary. The output is consistent. I check it, but I rarely touch it.
That's the pattern that works: AI as a step in a larger flow, not as the whole flow. When I tried to make AI the whole flow — just "hey, generate the listing from scratch" — the output required more editing than starting from scratch myself.
The no-code + AI combination is more powerful than either alone. Make.com handles the logic; AI handles the fuzzy middle part (data formatting, text generation, classification).
AI for Writing and Content — Where It Helps, Where It Hurts
I write my own posts. This one included.
But I use AI during the writing process in specific, contained ways:
Where it helps:
- Structural feedback. I'll paste a draft intro and ask "does this bury the lead?" Usually it does, and the model flags it correctly.
- Research shortcutting. "What are the main criticisms of Make.com vs. Zapier?" as a starting point, not an ending point.
- Meta description drafts. I'll write 3 versions fast and pick one, rather than laboring over 155 characters from scratch.
Where it hurts:
- Voice. AI writing sounds like AI writing. It's smooth and inoffensive and completely forgettable.
- First drafts. When I start with an AI draft and try to edit it into my voice, the result is worse than starting from scratch. The AI's structure fights my instincts at every paragraph.
- Anything that requires having actually done the thing. You cannot fake a genuine "here's what surprised me when I built X" using a tool that has never built anything.
The Tools I'm Actually Paying For Right Now
Not sponsored. Not affiliate links. This is just the list.
Claude (Pro) — My daily driver for thinking through problems, reviewing copy, and processing structured tasks. Worth it.
Perplexity (Pro) — Research. Saves me 20–30 minutes per research session compared to tabbing through Google.
Make.com — Not strictly "AI," but it's what makes AI useful in my stack. I'd call this foundational infrastructure.
What I don't pay for: Jasper, Copy.ai, or any of the "AI writing tool" category. Every one I tested was optimized for volume over quality. If I wanted volume over quality I'd hire a content farm.
Red Flags: AI Tools That Wasted My Time
The "AI-powered" upsell. If a tool's main selling point is "now with AI!" and it launched before 2023, assume the AI is a thin GPT-3 wrapper and the pricing is inflated. Test before you pay.
Voice cloning for content. I tried two tools that claimed to "write in your voice" based on training samples. The result was something that sounded like a mediocre impersonation. For a personal blog, that's worse than generic — it's uncanny valley.
AI image generation for anything professional. I've tried Midjourney, DALL-E, and a few others. For blog headers and social content, the results are inconsistent enough that I spend more time prompting and selecting than I would sourcing a real photo.
Tool Verdict Table
| Tool | What it's actually good for | Worth paying for? |
|---|---|---|
| Claude (Pro) | Reasoning, structural thinking, copy review | ✅ Yes |
| Perplexity (Pro) | Cited research, current info | ✅ Yes — if you research a lot |
| ChatGPT Plus | General use; slightly better coding help | ⚠️ Depends — I use Claude instead |
| Jasper / Copy.ai | High-volume generic content | ❌ Not for personal brand work |
| Midjourney | Creative imagery, not realism | ⚠️ Niche use case |
| "AI writer" category broadly | Volume content, not authentic voice | ❌ For this kind of blog: no |
| Make.com (with AI steps) | The best AI + no-code pairing I've found | ✅ Yes, mandatory |
The Meta Point
AI tools are in a hype cycle. Most "best tools" lists exist to capture search traffic, not to help you build something.
The useful question isn't "what are the best AI tools?" It's "what's the one manual task that's slowing me down most, and can AI remove it?"
For me, that was content processing in Shy Car. Find your version of that and you've found your tool. Everything else is optional.
Related from the build log: My full no-code + AI automation stack — the infrastructure behind all of this. And Webhook Automation for Non-Developers if you want the technical layer explained without the developer jargon.
