I don’t play the instruments anymore
The tools helping me become a powerful orchestrator of design.
Three weeks ago I told you that building your own website with AI is the most expensive way to save $25,000.
I meant it. I still mean it.
I also spend about two hundred and fifty bucks a month on AI tools and touch every one of them on a working day, which probably reads like I’m arguing with myself in public. I’m not. Those two things resolve, and how they resolve is the most useful thing I can hand you today.
Here it is: the tools got very good at the labor, and they did not get any better at the judgment.
Every tool below takes work off my hands. Not one of them makes a call for me. The day one starts making calls, it’s out.
So, roughly in the order I’d miss them.
The hub
Conductor — Free.
This is where my whole day happens. It’s the thing managing every AI project I have running, and the reason I like it is embarrassingly simple: it’s actually designed. Most of this category is a terminal with a personality disorder. Conductor is a real product, with a chat interface I don’t resent, and I can run four or five things in parallel and actually see what each of them is doing.
There are chimes. Little sounds that tell me something finished while I’m looking somewhere else. I did not expect to care about that and I care about it enormously, because it’s the difference between babysitting a machine and getting a tap on the shoulder when it’s done.
Everything else on this list is a section of the orchestra. This is the podium.
The engine
Claude — Max, which runs $100 or $200 a month depending on how hard you lean on it.
Coding, writing, planning, execution. It’s what Conductor is actually driving. I’ve hit the usage limit exactly once in all this time, and that was me screwing around with Fable seeing what it would do, which is a fair trade for a Tuesday.
This is the single biggest line item on the list and the only one I’d genuinely fight to keep.
The makers
Flora — $18/mo + usage (which can be pricey)
Node-based canvas for image generation, vector work, sketches, video. When I need something custom and there’s no stock version of it in the world, this is where I go. There are a few others I don’t subscribe to and just pay per use when a job calls for them, but Flora’s the one that stays.
Toolcraft— Free.
A starter kit for building your own design tools with AI. This one’s the sleeper. It lets me build things I flat out could not build in Figma, Illustrator, or Photoshop, because they don’t exist in those programs and never will. Nobody is going to ship the weird little utility I need for one specific job. So I make it. Then I keep making them.
The loop
Agentation — Free
This is how I critique what Claude is building. I point at the actual interface and say what’s wrong with it, and that turns into something the agent can act on. Design feedback has always been the hardest thing to transmit accurately. This is the first tool that made it feel like pointing at a screen with somebody sitting next to me.
Monologue — $15/mo.
Voice dictation. I’m going to be straight with you: I use it because we got a deal on it. Wispr Flow is just as good, and if you’re picking today, pick either. I’m not going to pretend there’s a principled reason when there isn’t one.
All I know is that if you're still typing, then you are moving ridiculously slow compared to dictating.
The canvas
Paper — $20/mo.
Not an AI tool. Possibly the most important one here anyway.
Paper renders real HTML on the canvas. Figma renders a picture of HTML and hopes for the best. That sounds like a technicality until you’ve spent a year handing designs back and forth with Claude Code, at which point it becomes the entire ballgame. What’s on my Paper canvas is the thing. There’s no translation step, no lossy handoff, no “well it looked right in the file.” And when I want to stop directing and put my hands on something, it still feels like Figma without the hiccups.
Figma — $20/mo
Still here. Not a daily driver anymore.
I open it when I want something genuinely crafted: a serious gradient, interesting shaders, bespoke imagery or vectors. Then I copy it into Paper before it goes anywhere near Claude, because Paper turns my stranger layouts into code a model can actually read.
That’s a real demotion and I want to be honest about it. Figma didn’t get worse. My workflow moved.
Adobe Illustrator — $20/mo
Still the GOAT for logo creation. Nothing else even comes close. Not for vector logos, at least. The typeface library alone settles it, and Shape Builder, the Pen tool, and Pathfinder are still better than what Figma ships. Figma has not caught up. I don’t say that as a bit, I say it as somebody who would love to consolidate and can’t.
Look at that list again and find the pattern, because it’s the only part of this issue that’ll still be true in two years.
Not one of those tools has an opinion. Conductor doesn’t know what good is. Flora will make you ten thousand images and won’t tell you which one is right. Claude will write you a headline in nine seconds and has no idea whether it’s the one.
They took the labor. The typing, the exporting, the resizing, the tedium that used to eat the middle of my day.
What’s left over is the part that was always the job, and I’ve got a lot more hours to spend on it now.
Here’s the crazy part: the tools getting cheap didn’t make taste less valuable. It made taste the only thing left that’s scarce. When everyone can generate everything, the person who knows which one to keep is holding the whole hand.
That’s why I can tell you AI-built websites are the most expensive way to save $25,000 and also tell you I use this stuff all day, without contradicting myself once. The stack isn’t doing my job, per se, it's just carrying out my orders.
— Zach 😎
PS — reply and tell me what’s in your stack. I nerd out over this stuff.
