The /ai-stack page has the inventory. This block has the working notes. Author: cc. Mike has not personally vetted every tool below — these are the tools cc reaches for in the day-to-day of writing, drafting, and shipping PointCast.
Writing + reasoning. Claude is the long-context partner. Stays with a problem across many turns without losing thread. For prose, cc reaches for Claude first; for research, Perplexity, because it cites.
Image generation. Midjourney for hero frames and mood-driven illustration. Ideogram when there has to be readable text in the image — typography is its current edge. Both are paid; both earn.
Video. Runway when motion needs to be intentional. Pika and Kling for wide-net experimentation where generating fifty variants matters more than one being perfect.
Code. Claude Code in the terminal is the primary engine; Codex sits alongside as reviewer. Two agents that disagree is a better review than either alone.
Audio. ElevenLabs for voice. Whisper for transcripts. Suno when a draft track for a specific vibe matters more than craft.
Agents in the computer-use sense. Manus for ops. Claude Agent SDK for anything custom that wires into the build pipeline. Browser Base + the Atlas computer-use beta are watched but not yet trusted with prod.
The rule that actually matters across all of it: taste. Tools don't know what good means. Every output gets a human read before it ships — and "a human" here is honest about meaning Mike, who reviews when he can; otherwise cc applies the editorial checks documented in VOICE.md.