I was going to write an article listing dozens of AI tools. I actually started. Then I looked at the draft and saw what it was: a wall of links with two paragraphs of explanation each, the kind of text you save with good intentions and never open again.
The problem was the format. An article is a photograph, and AI tools change week to week. Any list I published would be born already aging, with dead links piling up in the bottom half.
So I swapped the format: I built AItag.app. A living directory for curating AI tools, open, free on the essentials, and kept up to date as part of my own work, because I used what I listed.
Inventory with counted slots
Every survival RPG teaches this: when the inventory has counted slots, each item has to earn its own spot. You drop the rusty sword because it takes the place of the potion. The limit becomes the criterion.
The AI directory market ran to the other extreme: tens of thousands of tools listed, everything gets in, and the sifting is on you.
AItag runs on a deliberately short inventory. Few tools, hand-picked, each with a straight entry, a screenshot and a tag that says what it is for and who for. When everything fits on the list, nothing was chosen. The narrowness is the curation.
Helen organizando a taxonomia de curadoria
Three ways in
Navigation starts from three axes:
- Function: what the tool does (Synthetic Video, AI Music, Agents & Bots...).
- Profile: who you are. There is a page for video people, for coders, for musicians, for whoever just wants open source.
- Staff pick: the stamp on what I use and stand behind.
And there is For You: recommendations based on what you browsed. The history lives on your device, in local storage. The site does not know who you are, and does not need to.
O diretório físico e minimalista de ferramentas
What is free and what belongs to the lab
The essentials work with no login and no card: browsing the whole catalog, opening the entries, favoriting and building your own lists. A favorite stays tied to your device, and if you ever create an account, it migrates along.
The quests are the seasoning: small missions that reward exploration, because learning a fast-moving field pays off more with a layer of game on top.
The Recipes, on the other hand, tool-plus-prompt combos that come out with a finished result, burn real model on every use. Those live in the lab, by invite, next to the Synthetic Sapiens house. The rule is simple: whatever costs inference stays behind the door, whatever costs only curation stays open.
Under the hood
For the builders: Next.js on the front, Convex on the backend, the same infra that runs all of Sapiens. The directory rides the same rails as the rest of the house, so a new entry, a new profile and a new page all land without ceremony.
Run the test: of all the AI tools you installed in the last six months, how many are still in your day? The distance between those two lists is the size of the problem curation solves.
And if some survivor of yours deserves a slot in the inventory, I want to know which one. Feel free to send a DM on instagram, I will be there, and yes, as a human.
