How I work with AI

Every “best free AI tools” list online reads the same: fifty logos, no opinion, and half the tools gated behind a trial. I keep a much shorter list — the handful of free AI tools and resources I reach for on an actual SaaS video project, for scripting, captions, voiceover, stock footage and quick mockups.

No tool here made the cut because it has a slick landing page. Each one replaced a paid tool or a slow manual step on a real deadline, and I am naming the free tier limits too, because that is the part these lists always leave out.

Ask AI for a script and you will get the same thing every time: “Introducing the all-in-one solution that…” It reads like release notes with a voiceover, and viewers leave before the second sentence. The model is doing exactly what you asked. You asked it about the feature, not about the person watching.

The fix is a change of input, not a cleverer prompt. Start with the problem the viewer has on a Tuesday morning, make AI write five different first lines, and throw four away. The hook is the one part I still choose with my own gut.

Start with the easy wins. Auto-captions, silence and filler removal, and resizing one video into vertical, square and wide are solved problems now. Doing them by hand in 2026 is a hobby, not a workflow. Those are three of the seven; the other four are in the newsletter.

Now the three I keep for myself: the pacing of a cut, the timing of UI animation against what is on screen, and the order of the story. AI gets all three roughly right, and “roughly right” is the exact distance between a video people finish and one they close.

Every few weeks a new tool promises to replace your video workflow. I try most of them once, on real work, because a demo hides exactly what makes a tool annoying after a week.

The test is one question: does this remove a step, or does it add one more thing I have to check? Tools that remove a step stay and become invisible. The rest leave a browser tab open for a month and then quietly close. A tool that has to be babysat is not saving time, it is just moving the work.