🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.

Hola friend 👋,

I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.

This week: useful AI tools you probably didn’t know existed.

Yes, we all know how helpful tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or even our favorite AI image generators are. But some smaller, lesser-known AI apps are the real deal for productivity. I just love some of the clever ideas behind them.

This week, I’m sharing three tools that have genuinely impressed me with their smart solutions. These aren't the big names you hear about every day, but they're helpful nonetheless.

Plus: a fantastic, off-topic tool to manage your personal projects, a clever hack to find your next favorite book, and a slightly worrying trend taking over Amazon’s virtual bookshelves.

Know someone who’d love this newsletter? 5,500+ readers already do (thanks 🙌). Share it with friends & colleagues so they can join too Join for free here.

Atlas Browser (OpenAI)

AI Browser

If you haven't tried an AI-powered browser yet, you're missing out on a game-changer. While I’ve been using Perplexity’s Comet as my main browser for a while, I’ve recently started testing Atlas, OpenAI’s take on a smarter browsing experience, and I’m really starting to like it.

Atlas integrates AI at its core, allowing you to summarize articles, ask questions about the content of a page, and even generate content without switching tabs. It is great for productivity; you can:

Summarize articles with 1 click
Ask it to explain a concept you found on a page
Fill in forms or have it add products to your Amazon shopping cart
Extract content from a page, and more

If you love the feeling of increased productivity you get after using AI successfully, give Atlas from OpenAI a try; it might just become your new favorite app.

🛠️ Alternative to: Comet, Arc, Chrome

👉 Visit: chatgpt.com/atlas/

💰 It’s free to use, but works with your ChatGPT AI credits

Magical Chrome Extension

AI text Expander

I’ve been a loyal aText user for over a decade (my fav. text expander), but Magical has me questioning my loyalty. This AI-powered text expander is designed to automate repetitive writing tasks, and it does so with a level of intelligence that traditional text expanders can't match.

Magical allows you to save and instantly recall text snippets, from simple email addresses to entire paragraphs. But where it really shines is its ability to understand context and it can fill in spreadsheets, forms, database records, and more… the smart way.

I've been testing it for a few days now, and the setup is incredibly smooth. The AI-powered suggestions are surprisingly accurate. Is it enough to make me ditch aText for good? I am still deliberating on this.

🛠️ Alternative to: aText, TextExpander, Espanso

👉 Visit: getmagical.com

💰 From $6.50/month | Free plan available

Use.ai

AI Assistant

I bounce between ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini often, and honestly, it gets messy fast. Use.ai is one of those tools that makes you wonder why this wasn’t the default setup all along.

Instead of committing to a single AI, Use.ai lets you switch between multiple top models in one place. You can use GPT for writing, Claude for more structured thinking or coding, and others depending on what you need. It’s surprisingly smooth to jump between them without losing context.

What I like most is how it reduces friction. No more opening new tabs or copy-pasting prompts across tools. You can also upload files, run web searches, or generate images directly inside the same interface.

Of course, its web app is not as polished as others: you don’t get agent mode, a canvas to execute code, or a few of the more advanced features.

🛠️ Alternative to: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini (used separately)

👉 Visit: use.ai

💰 From $29.99/month | Free plan available

✨ Totally Off-Topic… But Brilliant

ClickUp

At Tooltester, we still use Trello for project management. But the truth is, I don’t like it. To me, it looks like it was designed in the 19th century and is missing relevant features (e.g. proper custom fields). So, for the projects I manage on my own, I use ClickUp.

ClickUp is a powerhouse of a project management tool. It's packed with features that Trello can only dream of, like managing multiple views in an easy way (Kanban, list, calendar, Gantt), custom fields, and powerful automations. It's the kind of tool that can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be.

Also, its AI integration (Brain AI they call it) looks promising, but I haven’t really used it yet since I already have my own workflows in place.

🛠️ Alternative to: Trello, Asana, Monday.com

👉 Visit: clickup.com

💰 From $7/month | Free plan available

⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack

This is how I pick my next book: AI-curated reading lists. By feeding your past books and ratings into an AI tool, it can identify patterns in your preferences and recommend new books aligned with your tastes, increasing your hit rate for good reads.

Here’s how to do it:

List your favorite books: Create a list of books you’ve enjoyed and, if possible, give them a rating.
Use an AI tool: You can use a tool like ChatGPT, Claude, or whatever you like.
Provide your list: Copy and paste your list into the AI tool and ask it to recommend similar books in the topic of XYZ.

You’ll be surprised at how accurately the AI can predict your tastes. It’s a great way to discover new authors and genres you might not have found otherwise.

🍿 Plot Twist of the Week

Speaking of books, AI-generated books are flooding Amazon.

A 2025 investigation found that 82% of herbal remedy books were likely written by AI, source, many containing misleading or unreliable advice. Of course, this has the potential to trigger so many health issues.

In another case, a Holocaust survivor’s memoir was cloned and republished using AI just days after release – source. You have to be heartless to do that. And this horror novel is being pulled because readers suspect it was secretly written with AI.

Some of these books are making real money for their ‘Authors’, so this to me raises serious questions about authenticity and the future of publishing in an AI-driven world.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’ll explore different ways to create a website in 2026, and I’ll share a tool that makes it easier than you ever thought possible.

Cheers,

Josep

P.S. Not subscribed yet? Sign up free here.