We write the AI guides we wished existed when we started building.

AI coverage is broken. It's vendor marketing dressed as journalism. It's influencer takes from people who never shipped a thing. It's affiliate-optimised listicles ranked by who pays best. None of it helps a builder figure out what actually generates value in production.

Agent Shortlist is the publication we wish existed when we started building with AI: independent, opinionated, and written for people who care whether a tool works in production. Not whether it demos well at a conference.

Our readers are founders, ops leads, marketers, developers, and anyone else shipping with AI right now, regardless of technical background. Claude and Claude Code are the most common tools in their stack. We treat that as the starting point, not the destination. We don't care which AI Twitter influencer is currently hyping which tool. We care about value: revenue, time saved, productivity gains.

How we test

Every platform we review gets put through real builder workflows until something breaks: sales follow-up sequences, customer support triage, internal Q&A, spreadsheet automation, and the code-adjacent tasks non-developers are now doing with Claude. We document the breakage, the time we lost we'd never get back, and the tools we'd quietly remove from our own stack tomorrow.

We don't take vendor demos as evidence. We don't reprint marketing copy. We don't run sponsored content. We name a winner, name runners-up, and call out the platforms that are hyped but broken.

How we make money

Right now, we don't. This publication is reader-supported in the sense that we write it because we think it should exist. If and when we add affiliate relationships or a paid tier, we'll disclose that clearly here and on the relevant pages.

Who runs this

Agent Shortlist is written and edited by Lucas Powell, founder of Growth 8020, an AI-first B2B marketing studio. He started this publication because his own team kept getting burned by AI tools that promised value and didn't deliver — and decided builders deserved better.

What we'll never do

• — Sponsored reviews disguised as editorial
• — Affiliate-padded rankings dressed as analysis
• — "Top 50" listicles with no opinion
• — Reviews of platforms we haven't actually used
• — Hype takes recycled from AI Twitter
• — Pretending to be neutral when we're not

Questions, tips, or platforms you'd like us to review? Get in touch.