I went down a rabbit hole this morning reading four late-2025 Juejin AI tool roundups back to back, and the thing that finally crystallized for me is that the Juejin "必备" list has quietly inflated from a curated seven or eight tools to a curated forty-five, and the engineers I know who are actually shipping code in 2026 are still running on roughly the same three or four. I would not have written that sentence six months ago, and I want to put it down somewhere I can find it before the roundup format gets even longer.
The piece that pushed me over the edge was the Juejin post that opened with "2025年45个高效的AI工具盘点" and then ran through ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, boardmix AI, Midjourney, Synthesia, Google Veo, OpusClip, Perplexity, Canva Magic Studio, Looka, Notion Q&A, Guru, Hubspot Email Writer, Fyxer, Shortwave, Manus, the Operator-style agent tools, and roughly twenty more, with a per-category "best pick" header for each slice of the market. To be fair the post was trying to be exhaustive rather than opinionated, and I am taking the exact tool count with a grain of salt because the post openly admitted it was rounding up to fill the title, but the shape of the roundup is the part that has been rattling around in my head all morning. The companion 2025 IDE ranking post named nine tools in a matrix, the AI office tools post named seven, the AI coding tools comparison named four, and the data tools post named ten. When I stack the four posts side by side the union set is somewhere north of fifty distinct product names, and the intersection of tools that show up in all four is basically Cursor, ChatGPT, and Claude Code. Honestly I am a little skeptical of any AI tool ecosystem that needs forty-five entries to feel complete, because the working engineers I talk to are not running forty-five tools, they are running three.
