Reference · 37 entries
Library
A curated index of tools, platforms, and references across creative engineering, AI, design, and digital craft — what each platform actually does, how it is priced, and the job it is genuinely good at. Maintained by hand, updated as the field moves.
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Assistants & reasoning
General-purpose models you talk to: writing, analysis, planning and code.
Claude
Freemium
Anthropic's assistant. Strong at long-form writing, analysis and agentic coding; Claude Code brings the same models into the terminal.
TextCodeAgentsChatGPT
Freemium
OpenAI's assistant, with image generation, browsing and code execution bundled into one interface.
TextImageCodeGemini
Freemium
Google's multimodal assistant, tightly wired into Workspace and with very large context windows.
TextImageVideoCodeKimi
Freemium
Moonshot's assistant, built around very long context. Useful when a model has to hold a whole book or codebase at once.
TextCodeDeepSeek
Freemium
Open-weight reasoning models at a fraction of the usual API price. The cheapest way to put a capable model behind your own product.
TextCodeNotebookLM
Freemium
Answers only from the documents you give it, and cites the page it took each claim from. The one assistant that will not invent a source.
TextAudio
Image generation
Text-to-image and image editing models, plus the interfaces around them.
Midjourney
Paid
The most opinionated image model on the market. Unmatched for art direction and consistent character work via style and character references.
ImageFlux
Open source
Black Forest Labs' image family. Open-weight variants make it the default when you need to fine-tune or run a model locally.
ImageAdobe Firefly
Freemium
Adobe's generative suite, trained on licensed material and embedded directly in Photoshop and Express — the safest option for commercial work.
ImageVideoKrea
Freemium
A real-time canvas that generates while you draw. The fastest way to explore a visual direction before committing to a render.
ImageVideoMagnific
Paid
Upscaling that invents plausible detail rather than interpolating it — skin, fabric, foliage. Powerful and opinionated, so it will happily change what it enlarges.
ImagePomelli
Free
Google Labs pointed at marketing production: campaign assets generated to sit inside a brand you already have. An experiment, with the lifespan that implies.
ImageText
Video & motion
Generative video, editing assistants and motion tooling.
Runway
Freemium
Generative video with a filmmaker's toolkit around it: camera control, inpainting, and frame-accurate editing.
VideoImageSora
Freemium
OpenAI's text-to-video model, strong on physical coherence and long shots.
VideoLuma Dream Machine
Freemium
Fast video generation plus photogrammetry and 3D capture from the same company.
Video3DMiniMax
Freemium
The lab behind Hailuo. Its video model reads motion and physical weight better than most, and the text and voice models sit in the same account.
TextVideoAudioGoogle Flow
Paid
A filmmaking front end for Veo: shot lists, camera moves and continuity between scenes, instead of one prompt at a time.
VideoImageAudioBytePlus
Paid
ByteDance's enterprise arm, and the way to reach its Seedance video and Seedream image models from outside China. Built for teams wiring models into a product.
TextImageVideo
Audio & voice
Speech synthesis, music generation and audio restoration.
ElevenLabs
Freemium
Voice synthesis, cloning and dubbing. The reference point for narration and character voice.
AudioSuno
Freemium
Full songs from a prompt — vocals, arrangement and mix. Useful for scratch tracks and mood pieces.
AudioFlow Music
Freemium
Full tracks from a prompt, in the same territory as Suno. Worth keeping both, for the days one model's read on a genre is simply wrong.
Audio
Build & deploy
Where you run, chain or fine-tune models yourself.
ComfyUI
Open source
A node graph for image and video pipelines. Steep, local, and the only sane way to make a generative process repeatable.
ImageVideoHugging Face
Freemium
The public commons for open models, datasets and demos. Start here when you want to know what actually exists.
TextImageAudioCodeCursor
Freemium
An editor built around model-assisted editing — useful for designers who write enough code to break things.
CodeGoogle AI Studio
Freemium
Where you prototype against Gemini and leave with an API key. The shortest path from an idea to a call you can ship.
TextImageVideoCodeLovable
Freemium
Describe an app and get a working full-stack one, then keep editing it in prose. Good for a prototype that runs, less so for a codebase you have to inherit.
Code
Run it locally
Models on your own hardware. Nothing leaves the machine, and nothing is metered.
Upscayl
Open source
Upscayl uses AI models to enhance your images by guessing what the details could be. It uses Real-ESRGAN and Vulkan architecture to achieve this.
ImageOllama
Open source
One command to pull a model, one endpoint to talk to it. The plainest way to run models on your own machine.
TextCodeLM Studio
Free
A desktop app for local models with the browser and the tuning knobs visible. Ollama with a face on it.
TextCodeNativ
Open source
Local models on Apple Silicon with chat, live performance readouts and editor hooks. MIT-licensed, for people who would rather nothing left the laptop.
TextImageAudioUnsloth
Open source
Fine-tuning that fits in far less VRAM and finishes far sooner. The reason one consumer GPU is now enough to train on.
TextCodeomlx
Open source
LM Studio's job, narrowed to Apple Silicon. The one to try if the Mac is the machine you actually run models on.
Text
Compute & training
Somebody else's GPUs, by the hour or by the request — and the tooling to train on them.
Replicate
Paid
Run thousands of open models behind one API, without touching a GPU yourself.
ImageVideoAudioTextfal.ai
Paid
Generative media models behind a fast API, tuned for image and video latency rather than for breadth of catalogue.
ImageVideoModal
Paid
Serverless GPUs for Python. Write a function, decorate it, and it runs on hardware you never provisioned.
CodeRunPod
Paid
GPUs by the hour or by the request, with templates for the usual model stacks. The middle ground between a laptop and a datacentre.
CodeVast.ai
Paid
A marketplace for other people's idle GPUs. The cheapest compute you will find, with the reliability that implies.
Code