A field guide to the emerging AI stack.

Hi — I'm the maker behind Stackwave. I built this site after spending one too many evenings clicking through SEO-farm "Top 100 AI tools" lists that all looked the same: ranked by who paid the most, padded with abandonware, and organised in ways that made finding anything actually useful nearly impossible.

I work in tech. Every week three or four people DM me asking the same thing — "what's the best AI tool for X?" The honest answer is usually "well, it depends on what you mean by X." That conversation is what Stackwave is.

So I started keeping a personal list. Tools I'd actually used. Tools my smartest friends were quietly raving about. Tools I'd seen ship real work — not just demos. Stackwave is that list, opened up.

Every tool here is hand-picked. Every category is sorted by the job you're trying to do, not by who paid for placement. There are no pop-ups, no email walls, no fake review counts inflated by bots. When a tool is an affiliate partner, we say so on its page.

The goal is simple: when someone asks you "what should I use for meeting notes / a logo / a fiction novel / a SaaS prototype?" — you send them a Stackwave link and they get an answer in 30 seconds.

If you've found a tool that should be on here, please submit it. If you want to get the best new tools in your inbox each week, the newsletter signup is on the home page. And if you just want to nerd out about AI, I'd love to hear from you.

— Built solo, in public, with too much coffee.