Tools Directory

AI tools, honestly rated.

Honest one-line verdicts. Deep dives where they exist, more coming weekly.

Skim this if you just want a default stack. Scroll further if you're here for MCP and security.

Recommended Solid Mixed Skip It

Frank Score Scale

1–3 Skip 4–6 Situational 7–8 Recommend 9 Strong Recommend 10 Daily Driver

Core Tools I Use Daily

ChatGPT

General AI Assistant

Still the most versatile all-rounder. GPT-4o is fast, capable, and handles most tasks well.

8 Does almost everything well enough to be your default.

Claude

General AI Assistant

Best for long documents, nuanced writing, and tasks that need careful reasoning.

9 Best reasoning engine I've tested. My daily driver for writing and analysis.

Perplexity

AI Search

The best AI search tool right now. Cites sources, stays current, and actually saves time.

8 Replaced Google for 80% of my research queries.

NotebookLM

Research & Synthesis

Feed it documents, get genuinely useful summaries and briefings. Google's sleeper hit.

7 Genuinely useful for document synthesis. Limited by source upload cap.

Cursor

AI Code Editor

AI-powered VS Code fork that actually speeds up coding. Not magic, but genuinely useful.

6 Speeds up boilerplate but still hallucinates APIs.

Midjourney

Image Generation

Still produces the best-looking images. The Discord workflow is painful but results speak.

6 Beautiful output, terrible UX. Discord-only is a dealbreaker for teams.

Gemini

General AI Assistant

Improving fast but still inconsistent. Great Google integration, mediocre standalone performance.

5 Google integration is the only reason to use it over Claude or ChatGPT.

Copilot (Microsoft)

Productivity Suite AI

Promising concept, uneven execution. Works well in some Office apps, barely functional in others.

5 Word is decent. Excel is unreliable. Teams is a coin flip.

Jasper

AI Writing

Marketing-focused writing tool. Decent templates, but the output needs heavy editing.

4 Templates save time but the output reads like it was written by a committee.

Otter.ai

Transcription

Reliable meeting transcription with good speaker detection. Does one thing and does it well.

6 Solid transcription. Speaker detection is the real value.

Notion AI

Productivity

Useful if you already live in Notion. Not worth switching to Notion for.

5 Useful inside Notion. Useless outside it.

Synthesia

AI Video

AI-generated talking heads for corporate video. Looks better than before, still feels uncanny.

4 Uncanny valley is still too deep for external-facing content.

For Builders: Top 10 MCP Servers Advanced / Security Series

FRANK SCORE // UPDATED MARCH 2026

Frank's Top 10 MCP Servers

Ranked by usefulness, scoped by trust. Start read-only. Observe before you wire in anything with write access.

#1

GitHub MCP

GitHub (official)
9/10 Official

Start read-only. Watch what it notices unprompted.

🔒 At work: Scope to branch and PR only. Nothing touches main without a human.

#2

n8n MCP

n8n (official)
9/10 Official

Best compound value. Claude will chain workflows without being asked.

🔒 At work: Build approval steps into workflows before connecting to anything real.

#3

Filesystem MCP

Anthropic (official)
8/10 Official

Narrow blast radius. Point it carefully.

🔒 At work: Local only by design. The blast radius is whatever directory you point it at.

#4

Fetch MCP

Anthropic (official)
8/10 Official

Clean, simple, read-only by design. Good first server.

🔒 At work: Avoid pointing it at internal URLs. Designed for public content only.

#5

Brave Search MCP

Brave (official)
8/10 Official

One job, does it well. Easy entry point for MCP beginners.

🔒 At work: Audit what it searches. Queries go through Brave's servers.

#6

Postgres MCP

Anthropic (official)
7/10 Official

Powerful. Read-only mode exists for a reason. Use it.

🔒 At work: Never production credentials. Read-only until you've watched it run for a month.

#7

Notion MCP

Community-maintained
7/10 Community

Scope it to one database before you trust it.

🔒 At work: Default access sees everything in your workspace.

#8

Puppeteer MCP

Anthropic (official)
7/10 Official

It fills forms and clicks buttons. Guardrails required.

🔒 At work: Form-filling with AI behind the wheel needs human review before production.

#9

Obsidian MCP

Community-maintained
7/10 Community

Your vault contains things you forgot you wrote. Audit before connecting.

🔒 At work: Personal knowledge bases contain things people assume are private.

#10

Slack MCP

Community (no official)
6/10 Community

Highest enterprise risk on this list. Wait for an official build.

🔒 At work: Slack conversations contain things people assume are private. Treat accordingly.

The pattern across all ten: start read-only, scope tight, observe before you trust. The tools are real. The governance is not there yet. Both things are true.

More reviews in progress. Check back.

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