ABOUT

A tooling-first AI newsletter.

The AI Toolchain is a daily newsletter — with a podcast alongside it — built for AI practitioners, product leaders, advisors, and investors who want to understand not just what is happening in AI, but what is being built to solve it.

Most AI media chases headlines. We do the opposite — every day we track what ~800 AI tools actually shipped, write up the features that matter with the exact commands to run them, and put the tools themselves on screen. If you buy, use, or evaluate AI tooling for a living, this is for you.

Five newsletters run off the same watchlist. Tail is the daily release firehose; Grep narrows it to the tools you actually run and arrives only when they ship; Head highlights the week's top picks; Diff reports what vendors quietly changed in their product documentation; and Uniq tracks how they reposition themselves — the category they claim, the buyer they name, and the prices on the page. Everything published on this site is free to read, and Head is delivered free to anyone who wants it. Paid plans add the daily cadence, filtering to your own stack, Diff and Uniq, which have no free web edition, and the additional data signals and analytics we publish nowhere else.

// OUR VISION

Our vision is for the world to have better AI tools at its disposal. If we're to accomplish that, it would mean the insights here not only reached product leaders, founders, and maintainers, but were incorporated into what they're building — and that every organization had the information it needs to adopt the AI defenses that protect it.

tct — whoami

$ cat ./mission.txt
# format: newsletter · show · articles
▸ track every release, every day
▸ show tools, don't summarize them
▸ run the real commands, on screen
▸ talk to the people who build them

$ whoami
jon_schipp # host & creator

THE HOST

Jon Schipp

HOST & CREATOR · Founder, AI, Product Leader, Board Advisor

Jon has spent his career across AI engineering, incident response, and software development — building tools, running them in anger, and evaluating the teams behind them. That tooling-first instinct is the whole premise of the newsletter and the show.

He came up couch-surfing his way to hacker conferences as a teenager, and curiosity has been the through-line ever since. Affectionately known in the community as the "Ric Flair of AI."