Tools like Codex and Code are taking over the world, but no one's talking about the tools that you use alongside
Codex
and Claude Code. Because here's the thing, these AI agents are powerful, but they're only as good as what you feed them. The input matters. The context
matters. How fast you move between your AI agent and the rest of your computer
matters.
So here are seven tools that I've downloaded on my Mac that I use to make AI agents 10 times better. So before we dive into tool number one, I wanted to talk about Codecs. So Codecs is the tool that I've been using for the past month or two. It is an AI agent tool that can create any type of file on my computer, and you can think of Codecs as a combination
of Claude Code and Claude Cowork. In Codex, you can vibe code any project, and it will actually open up on the right side of the screen. You can also create any type of document. So you can ask Codex to create an Excel sheet, a document,
or a PowerPoint presentation.
And what I like about this tool is it allows me to multitask
by switching
the chat thread,
and I can work on many things at the same time. And as I'm multitasking,
this requires a lot of typing,
which brings me to my first tool. The first tool that I use with my AI agents is WhisperFlow.
WhisperFlow is a voice to text model that lives on your keyboard. Right? I can press one single button on my keyboard and I can speak and that will immediately be turned to text. And so I'm constantly prompting. I'm sending things like, please can you make a notes app with a full database,
and I want you to make it look like Notion. Now,
I can switch agents.
I want you to tell me, uh, any marketing opportunities
for note taking tools. I want you to search the internet, find market opportunities.
Where could I find a marketing strategy?
What can I do to grow my note taking app?
Alright. I can just fire off these agents just by speaking into my computer.
Neon Postgres
integration,
please tell me about that. What am I able to do with Neon? This is one of my first times vibe coding, so can you please explain to me how that works? And as you can see here, you can fire off tasks to agents. And each of these tasks, because we're using GPT 5.5 high or extra high, I switch between these two. These agents can take a while, so you should be multitasking.
I find speaking into my computer is significantly
faster. And so if you go to whisperflow.ai
and you download it for your Mac, they also have a Windows app if you have Windows,
you can download it and their free print plan is pretty generous, But it is a paid plan after you say enough words throughout the week. And again, none of these are sponsored,
so I'm sure there's cheaper alternatives out there. And if you don't wanna hold down the f n key, you can actually double tap it. And what it will do is I can actually go fully hands free and record my voice.
And remember, you don't need to like stay on this page while you're using it. I could completely switch apps. I could go click around
and I might wanna think like Whisper,
Flow, Docs. I might wanna like go to different pages,
do some research on it and and I might wanna go to different websites and then I can go back to Codex and then if I go back to Codex here and then I just press the f n key again, that text will be inserted directly
in Codex.
Another thing to note, let's say I'm recording my voice right now, I'm recording, I'm recording, I click on something and then I accidentally
press it like that. Right? I didn't have my cursor in here and it wasn't entered in
the text box. All I need to do is go to Whisper Flow
and I can see all of my recent ones. So I can just very easily copy this and paste it in. Now I wanna move on to tool number two that I use with AI agents. Tool number two is arguably my favorite and that is Raycast.
Raycast is a desktop app that lives on my computer and this app, it has a lot of different uses to a lot of different people. For me, I primarily use it as a clipboard manager.
It saves everything I copy to my clipboard. So let's say I'm doing research on Codex and I find this tweet, I can just copy all of these different links. We can go back to codex
and what I can do is if I hit command m,
it opens up the Raycast
clipboard and I can paste all of these in. And so I can see all of these different tweets and you'll notice here that they even have like a little graphic that shows which tweet it is
and I have it set to save my clipboard history for the last month.
So that means if I go command m and then I type x.com,
we have all of the links that I've copied to my clipboard.
But it also works with images as well. Let's say I'm making a presentation and we're making a slide deck directly inside Codex, I can very easily, if I find an image I like, I can just copy the image,
I can just copy the image, I can just copy the image. And if we go back to Codecs
and I were here, like, let's say we're making a slide deck, I can hit command n on Codecs to make a new chat. Please make a slide deck and include these images. This should be a complete guide to Claude code. And if you hit command m to open up your clipboard history, I can actually filter them by images. So these are all of the images that I've saved to my computer over the past month, and I can actually scroll down and see all of the images that I've saved. First, open up Raycast, it will look a lot like this. You won't actually have these shortcuts set up for command m for your clipboard history. And so what you'll need to do is you'll just need to type in clipboard history.
You want to right click it or double click it with on the trackpad on a Mac. And then you can actually scroll down and you can go to configure command.
And so then, this will open up all of the commands here.
One other thing when you open this, not only can I type in any app on my computer and it's significantly faster than the one built into Apple, which is the Spotlight app? You can actually just use this as a calculator, which is one little thing. Like, can go 1,000 times 1,000,
and it'll show you. It has like this like live calculator
that's built into this. So this here is Raycast.
Every single thing that I showed you is a 100%
free.
They have a pro plan, but that's to access their AI features and their cloud features, none of which I use. And so I've been using Raycast for three years now, and I use it so often, and I've never paid them a dime. I honestly feel like I owe them money because this tool is so good and I just use their free plan. So the third tool that I use with AI agents is the most visual.
It is CleanShot
X.
So if you've used a Mac, you know that command shift four
is a screenshot. Well, when you download CleanShot X, it acts a little bit differently. So this is a website that we've created. If we hit command shift four,
I can take a screenshot and instead of it showing up on the bottom right and going away, it shows up here on the left and it just stays there. So I can actually create a bunch of different screenshots and they can end up they just stack here on the left. What makes this so important is oftentimes when you're making a website and you might actually be making a document and we wanna make changes to a specific part, I can screenshot it. I can open this up like this in CleanShot X and I can use these arrows to point at specific things.
I can even use text and say like dots
should be bigger.
Right? And so I can give context really quickly to the AI agents and then I can just copy this and then I can paste it in. And all of these stay pinned until I hit copy or save. Let's say I wanted to make a change to
the sidebar,
I could just say, like, I could use this arrow and just say, like, I don't like this.
You know, it's just really easy to give a lot of context really quickly. I could just include this image right here, make better banner
options,
and then I could say,
I don't like this whole thing. So I can use a shape, and could say this kinda just looks weird. And then I could say, for the third image that I uploaded, this kind of looks weird. I want that whole, like, thing that I put in a rectangle, just kind of change that. I don't like the horizontal lines there. And so much about AI agents is giving good context
to the agents.
There's nothing better than visuals. I'll go over cost in just a second. I do wanna talk about the fact that if you hit command shift five,
you can actually take a video, and it is really good video
screen share software.
And so I can very easily just record my screen,
and you can either record a GIF or a video, and I can just record a video. Please do research on CleanShot X. Tell me everything there is to know about it. I love it so much. And so we're just taking a video here. You can easily pause it. So right now, you know, when I do some demos on X, I'll often pause it while it's loading or thinking, and then I can play it once it gets to, like, the action. And these are really easy to just take some videos to post on Twitter. Once you're done filming your video,
just like the photos, you'll see you'll have a fifteen second video here on the left side and then I can very easily just navigate and remember to navigate we'll use Raycast. We can open up Comet and we can go to Twitter
And since we have this video, we can just drag this video directly into the tweet. Oh my god. This is absolutely insane. One of my favorite features for any app. Right? We're starting to use these workflows together,
and there you go. We took a screen recording, uploaded it, used WhisperFlow to write out my tweet. And so CleanShot X, which you can find on cleanshot.com,
is a $30
one time fee. If you want their cloud, they have a recurring service.
I actually don't do that. I just pay for their local storage version,
which saves everything locally to your computer. I don't use their cloud. For tool number four that I use with AI agents, it's one of the coolest,
and it is the one that makes feel the most futuristic and that is Paper. So I can type in Paper and
Paper looks a lot like Figma except it's built specifically for AI agents. On Codex, when you set up Paper,
you can actually set up the Paper MCP.
So imagine we're building this Notes app, and I can hit command n to open up a new chat.
And when you create a new chat within a new project, it sees everything that's in this project. So that Notes app, it has that context. So I can say, hey, so you know the Notes app that we're working on that looks like Notion? I actually wanna come up with some other design ideas. Can you please create three different options
for the the main notes page?
And then I can do slash paper
m c p, and what it will do is I can just press enter,
and it actually connects
to paper that's open on my computer, and it will design directly on paper. And by the way, if I wanna use codecs with another app, what I do is I'll come here, I will open this up in a mini window,
drag it to the side, pin it to the side like this. Now what we're gonna do is we're gonna open up Paper on the right side of this, and you'll notice here the agent is already working. I'm not doing anything. Right now, all I did was say use the paper MCP
and it's creating real designs
in real time. So here I can see the thinking, I can see that it's working on this design here, I'm not doing anything. And take a look at this. It's creating these designs and I love this animation. Like, it looks so cool. You can zoom all the way in, you can click on it. If I double click on this, I can literally change the text directly
and I can actually just make edits similar to Figma.
You don't have full control like Figma because it's still like code based. So like if I try to drag something down, it may be in relation to it, like they kind of like you can like drag things
down. It's a little bit different than Figma, but I think it's really fun to use. I can hit back space and we can just see the AI building our designs in real time. You can see here it's making another design. This is a little bit different. And there we go. We have three design directions.
I can come back here. Hey, I really like design number one. Can we please make three variations that are more like design number one? Try different color styles, different font styles,
use your best judgment. And if you ever wanna reference a specific component, like if I were to wanted to like change this,
I can select this and you can just copy this link and I can paste it in and be like, hey, and also like this part, I don't like it. And so then I can just paste in this link which references that component
and I can just press enter. And the agent will then start making some more variations
on this design, and it has reference to that specific component. And so Paper
has a paid subscription, which I'll get to in just a second, and part of that is you get image generation. And with image generation, I'm using I can use OpenAI Image two and I could say, like, let's say we wanted to add images on a landing page, I could put like beautiful
waterfall
background and we can generate images directly in here. Let's say we wanted it four by three, you can generate an image and it will actually generate directly on the frame. It's making the changes that we wanted. All of these are gonna be similar to this one right here. But our image is done generating.
And so what you can do is you can very easily
select any image and we could say, like, make this
glossier,
make it colder,
so
some
frost
on image. So we can run that and it will create a variation of that image. So that's a fun thing that you can do. Here we see that it's making even more variations of this in slightly different colors. It's made to be used with your AI agents. And I've been talking about this a lot. There will be a lot more tools coming around that are made specifically for your AI agents. Okay. So the cost for this tool is $16
a month if you pay annually, $20 a month if you pay monthly. I will say there is a free plan. You basically get like a limited amount of tool calls. So there is a usage cap and then you have to pay either annually or monthly
and that's the cost of using paper. So the next tool is Readwise or the Readwise Reader. This is my second brain tool and they have a Chrome extension. And all of my tweets
automatically get saved here. So they have a setup where you can actually sync your bookmarks. So when you bookmark something on x,
it automatically gets saved to your Readwise reader. And you can see here I have a lot of tweets saved and anything that gets saved gets saved with the assets in a clean list
that I can go back and look at. Anything that I find useful for content, I can just save. What they recently released is a MCP
and they also released a plugin. So if you go to plugins on Codex,
you can just type in Readwise
and you can see here they have a Readwise integration.
This allows you to create a new chat and I can say please summarize
my last three days
on at Readwise.
Please group them by topic
and put them in a slash,
let's do a word doc.
Please
make it good.
There you go. And so what this will do is this will search for our second brain tool. It'll search through all of the things that I've saved recently
and it will give us a nice give me a nice summary. Okay. So I've bookmarked a lot of different things over the last three days. So a 144 items were saved during that window, and we can see this document.
We have a topic map, so AI agents and control layers,
Apple and ambient devices, markets, energy, infrastructure, geopolitics, institutions. It's kind of a cool, like, glimpse into what my interests are. These are the things that I bookmark and I can create this document. Normally, put it in an Excel sheet with a clickable link, which I could literally say, hey, can you actually put it in a sheet and make all the links clickable to the original source? Right? And now I can change it to an Excel sheet. The point is, I can take all of that data, which is my second brain, anything I bookmark, or anything that I manually save with their Chrome extension,
it's a very easy way to interact with all of the things that you find interesting.
Super useful. So Readwise
is
$9.99
per month. That's what I'm paying. I don't think it's too crazy. If anyone knows any alternatives for this that's cheaper, let me know in the comments. I'm willing to switch. I just love that I can save everything to one place and my AI agents can go through them. That's why I use this. For the sixth best tool that I use with AI,
it is Excalidraw.
And so Excalidraw is a visual diagramming
software. And if you guys watch my videos, you know I love using Excalidraw.
It makes it really easy to type
whatever I want and make a visual diagram and they have really good keys. So I can press 2 to create this, I can press five to create these lines really easily. It is just the best diagramming
workflow software.
Well, it turns out that AI is actually really good at using Excalidraw.
And if you go to Codex and you use the Excalidraw
skill that I've created and remember in Codex you go slash and then you type out your skill and mine is the Excalidraw diagram skill. I'll put it in the link into the description for the Excalidraw diagram skill
but you can say please
do research
on the latest
advancements
in language
models,
especially with DeepSeek
and
how it works.
Please create
a visual
presentation
on this. And this will take up to ten minutes because it's gonna do in-depth research before it creates the diagram. But I'll show you an example of one that I've created in the past. I used my YouTube researcher skill to analyze Cain Calloway, who's one of my friends who's actually a great YouTuber.
I wanted to analyze all of his videos and then it created this presentation. And part of this Excalidraw skill is it can I'll show you. So it just returns this link and you can right click it and hit open in browser and then you can click replace my content and this is what the AI generated. A full presentation.
I think it's 12 different slides
explaining
Cain Calloway's
full YouTube flow because he makes content about how to create content,
and that's what all of these slides are about. It talks about his dopamine ladder. It talks about psychology
and rhythm and tone, and it creates these nice little presentations.
Sometimes,
you need to make some slight adjustments,
but that's part of the fun, is it creates kind of a general outline that you can then edit. And so this allows me to create presentations really quickly. I usually just write down all my ideas really quickly. AI creates a shell, then I go through and edit them for whatever presentation that I'm trying to make. Everything that I showed you, I believe, can be done on the free plan. Like, you can create these boards and then open them. You just can't save multiple of them unless you do the paid plan, and the paid plan is $6 a month when you do annual.
I think it's, like, $9.99 if you do it monthly. And you can find this on excalidraw.com.
It is literally one of my favorite tools. I've been using it as a content creator for about two years now. And moving to the final and best tool that you can use with Codex
is your own. On Codex, you can literally build your own tool and I'm gonna show you a tool that I made in a single prompt. I'm telling you, I want you to train your brain into thinking whenever there's a tool that you wish existed,
you should try and build a desktop that does the exact thing that you want. And I made an extremely
niche tool the other day in one prompt, this is an electron
desktop app. And so I was on Google Docs. So if we go to docs.google.com,
this is how I write my scripts when I'm doing a a more structured video. I usually write out the intro.
And when I'm communicating with my editors about what to show on the screen, I want to be able to like add images or videos
directly
on here. I like to be able to comment and I want to be able to add videos to this comment. The unfortunate fact is is I actually can't do that on Google Docs. So I, in one prompt, created this skill where I can press command option l,
it opens up this little little app here. And so let's say I wanted to add an image
on a specific part, I can add any image or video. Right? And remember, we're using the same tools that we were using before. I'm I'm gonna record a little video here as an example and I'm gonna press stop. And so I can upload these videos
to this app and say, please add these
when I say this part.
And so this little app that I keep on my desktop is called leave a comment. I can very easily copy this link and paste it here in the comments. So now when my editor comes here and looks at this, he'll see this link and this is what he'll see. A public link with those assets that he can very easily download.
It's literally called leave a comment and it says Riley Brown left a comment and I can include any asset. It can be an SVG,
PNG,
or a video and they I can leave as many comments and videos and assets as I want, and I created this in a single prompt using Codecs, and I used Firebase Storage for the storage. And so in order to create your own desktop app, all you have to type in is please create an electron app that does blank.
When you're done, please download it to my computer and I want to test it and use it. And you can literally create in one prompt
an app that solves a very specific problem. One thing I didn't even show
in this app, if you upload let's say I were to upload an image here, I can do a lot of what you can do with CleanShot Pro. You know how CleanShot Pro I can add stuff to this? If I paste it in here, I just tried to see in this one prompt how much of CleanShot Pro could I add to this app and I added a lot of what you can do in the CleanShot Pro in this app. You can even draw little arrows.
The arrows are a little messed up, it's kinda weird, but a lot of what you can do in CleanShot Pro, you can add and this app costed me like maybe, I don't know, $3 of tokens
and it's an app that I can use that has full storage that I actively use in my workflow.
And this is just a little tool that allows me to leave a comment. It does no more than I need it to. It's not a full production app for other people. It does exactly what I want it to do. And that is the essence of this last category of tool, which is build your own. So in summary, AI agents are super useful. I love using tools like Codecs. And if you use Claude Code, that's great as well. But there are some tools that go along with these AI agents that make life so much easier, and we talked about Excalidraw,
which allow you to create diagrams and AI agents, especially codecs with the plugin, can create Excalidraw diagrams.
Readwise for a second brain, paper dot design is basically like an AI powered Figma, clean shot pro to basically very quickly be able to take high quality screenshots.
Raycast is super cool because you have your clipboard history. You can categorize your clipboard history.
Whisper flow so that you can very easily
say things out loud, and then it shows up on your screen.
And then finally,
you have build your own. You can literally build your own tool using AI, and then you can use it every day.
And I'm telling you right now, this is how you create a valuable business. The more you get in the habit of just building tools that solve your own problems, you're more likely to stumble on something that other people would want as well. So I highly recommend this. Plus, it's really rewarding and fun. Anyway, thank you guys so much for watching. If you enjoy videos like these, please hit that like button. Please hit subscribe. I make multiple videos like this every single week, so make sure to follow-up for that. I'll see you guys later. Peace.