What Are AI Tools?

Sources#

LLM Knowledge Bases

Answer#

Based on the knowledge base, "AI tools" refers to products and services built on top of large language models and related AI technologies that people use for practical work. The wiki currently covers two facets of AI tools:

1. AI Products & Services (Consumer/Professional)#

Claude (by Anthropic) is the primary AI product documented in this wiki. It is an LLM-based assistant used for tasks like report generation, research, and general-purpose reasoning.

2. AI-Powered Toolchains (Developer/Knowledge Worker)#

The wiki documents a class of AI tools that use LLMs as components in larger workflows rather than as standalone chat interfaces:

LLM-as-compiler pipelines — Andrej Karpathy's architecture where an LLM incrementally compiles raw documents into a structured wiki. The LLM acts as a build tool (compiler), not a conversational agent. Tools in this pipeline include:
Obsidian Web Clipper — converts web pages to markdown for LLM ingestion
Q&A Agents — LLM-powered research tools that query the wiki and file answers back
Search engines — "vibe-coded" naive search over wiki content, usable via CLI or web UI
qmd CLI (github.com/tobi/qmd) — used in Elvis Saravia's variant for indexing research papers
MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools — used in Saravia's variant to build interactive artifact generators that produce explorable visualizations across research corpora.

Key Distinction#

The wiki implicitly distinguishes between two modes of AI tooling:

AI as a service — products like Claude where the user interacts with the model directly (chat, Q&A)
AI as infrastructure — systems where the LLM is embedded into an automated pipeline, doing structured work (compilation, indexing, linting) with minimal human interaction per step

The knowledge base itself (this Obsidian vault) is an instance of the second category — it uses Claude Code as a compiler to maintain a structured wiki.

Gaps in Coverage#

Notable AI tool categories not yet covered include:

Image/video generation tools (Midjourney, DALL-E, Sora)
Code assistants beyond Claude Code (GitHub Copilot, Cursor)
Voice/speech AI (Whisper, ElevenLabs)
AI search engines (Perplexity, SearchGPT)
Open-source LLM toolchains (LangChain, LlamaIndex, vLLM)

Sources#

LLM-as-Compiler Knowledge Base — architecture pattern for LLM-powered knowledge bases
LLM Knowledge Bases — Karpathy's and Saravia's LLM knowledge base approaches