The 45-tool problem: why Juejin 必备 roundups have stopped helping me pick AI tools

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 numbers behind the inflation

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.

The lost curation signal

The meta-pattern I want to put down before I forget it is that the Juejin roundup format has been optimizing for completeness and in the process has lost the curation signal. The 2024 roundups I bookmarked were eight tools, tightly ranked, with one clear winner per category and a sentence on why the runner-up lost. The late-2025 roundups are forty-five tools, vaguely bucketed, with explicit 谁先选 and 谁备选 labels next to each row and an implicit understanding that nobody is going to install all of them.

To be fair, the format is responding to a real signal - the AI tool market genuinely did explode in 2025, and the post that only names eight tools is going to look incomplete to the reader who has heard of Manus, 即梦 AI, 灵绘 AI, Gamma, Dify, and the forty other tools that show up in their feeds. But the format has crossed a line where completeness stops being a feature and starts being a productivity tax. I think the working engineers I know would rather see the four tools the author actually uses than the forty-five tools the author has heard of.

What the roundups are good for (and not)

The practical takeaway I want to call out is that the Juejin 必备 roundups are still genuinely useful for two narrow jobs and not very useful for the third job most readers think they are doing.

• Discovery job - They are good at this. The first time you hear about a tool like Manus, Dify, Coze, or the newer mem0-style memory layer projects, it is usually through one of these posts, and the bucketing is better than scrolling Twitter.
• Pricing job - They are good at this. The AI tool pricing guide style posts really do anchor on the twenty-dollar monthly tier and call out which tools are above or below it.
• Picking job - They are not good at this, and that is the job most readers are actually trying to do. To pick a tool you need a benchmark, a case study, or a stress test from someone who has actually used it for a quarter. None of the forty-five-tool roundups I read this morning had any of those for the tools past position five.

I have not stress-tested Manus, Dify, or 即梦 AI the way I have with Cursor, Claude Code, and ChatGPT. I want to actually run them for a quarter before I oversell or undersell them. But the fact that the roundups keep listing them as 首选 without showing any usage data tells me the format is recommending on vibes, not on evidence.

Where I land now

I will reassess in three months. The last time I said that, I was mostly bouncing between Cursor and Claude Code for coding and ChatGPT Plus for everything else - which is still roughly where I land.

What has changed is that I now treat the Juejin 必备 roundups as a discovery feed rather than a buying guide. I think that split is going to age well.

Give it six months, and I expect either the roundups to compress back down to a curated short list, or the working engineers to stop reading them entirely. Whichever one moves first will tell me whether the format is going to survive the AI tool market's own expansion.