You don't need ten AI tools. You need one, and the discipline to actually use it.

A different kind of issue this time. No agent. No master prompt. Just something I keep wanting to say to people who ask me how I got into all this.

Most of us start the same way. Read an article, see a tool, go to YouTube, watch a video, get excited, sign up.

I did exactly that with Manus AI, maybe a year ago. Caught a mention in my Google News feed, watched the one demo video they had at the time, was floored, applied for beta access, sent them a long write-up of what I wanted to build. Got in.

Did I actually build it? Sort of. About 10% of what I'd pitched.

That's not Manus's fault. That's the pattern.

You see a tool. You imagine the version of yourself who uses it well. You sign up. Then real life happens, you don't actually invest the hours, and three months later you're paying for something you opened twice.

I've done this with more tools than I want to admit.

At one point last year I was paying for or had active beta access to: ChatGPT Plus, Claude, Gemini (free with my Pixel, so no charge), Manus, Gamma, Canva, MyFitnessPal. Before all of those, I'd spent two weeks deep in Make.com and Zapier trying to automate things that didn't need automating. When DeepSeek was heating up earlier this year I tried that too, just to see. There were probably others I've forgotten.

The honest truth: I wasn't getting more done. I was just spreading the same effort across more tools.

My data was being built on ChatGPT. My actual writing was happening on Claude. Gemini was a glorified search bar. Manus was for the occasional comparison. Gamma made decks. Canva made one-pagers. MyFitnessPal counted calories.

Every one of these is a competent product. Make.com and Zapier in particular are powerful in the right hands. None of them, alone, was the problem. The problem was that I had relationships with none of them.

It took the better part of a year to stop pressing subscribe.

Right now I have one paid AI subscription: Claude.

That's it.

Claude does almost everything I need. This newsletter is drafted with the help of an agent inside it. My deal flow analysis runs through it. So does my writing. So does most of my thinking work.

Gemini is still on my phone because the integration is good and it's free. I use it as a search agent, not as a thinking tool.

Manus I open maybe once a month, usually for a specific comparison task where I want a fourth opinion.

Everything else is gone. MyFitnessPal cancelled when I built the food agent. Gamma cancelled months ago. Canva I don't think I've opened in six months.

I haven't lost anything by consolidating. I've gained the one thing all that switching was costing me: depth.

The case against tool-hopping isn't ideological. It's practical.

Memory compounds. An agent that's been watching you eat for six months is better than one you set up yesterday. A writing assistant that knows your voice from 50,000 words of prior drafts is better than one you've used twice. Switching tools resets the relationship.

Workflows deepen. When you've used one tool long enough, you stop thinking about how to use it and start thinking about what to use it for. That's the actual unlock. It doesn't happen in week one. It happens in month three, four, five.

Migration breaks more than it builds. I tried moving my entire ChatGPT workload to Gemini once. It was a disaster. The agents lost their context. The memory didn't transfer cleanly. I spent two weeks rebuilding what had been working fine before.

Most people who feel like they're "not getting much out of AI" aren't using the wrong tool. They're using too many of them, none of them well.

Specific recent example. I had to put together a deck for work.

A year ago I would have opened Gamma, picked a template, fought with it for an hour, exported something passable.

Yesterday I just stayed inside Claude. Pulled the research, the notes, the memos I'd already drafted. Asked it to structure a deck. The output wasn't going to win design awards, and Gamma's templates probably look prettier in isolation. But what came back fit exactly what I needed for the meeting. Cleaner narrative, tighter logic, less noise.

I sent it. Nobody asked what tool I used.

That's the thing about tools. The audience doesn't see them. They see the result.

If you're staring at YouTube videos trying to figure out which AI tool to subscribe to first, here's the honest answer:

Pick one. Stay with it for three months. Don't subscribe to anything else in that window. Build one real workflow. Use it every day. Let it learn you.

The discipline isn't in finding the perfect tool. The discipline is in not running away from the one you've got.

You'll know it's working when you stop watching tutorials and start having opinions.

— Kashed In

PS — A book is coming. About the agents behind all this, and the life around them. Title and date to follow.