Six rigs that survived 2025
Templating, eval grids, the after-effects sheet and three other tiny tools I still reach for.
Year-end ritual: which of the tools I built in 2025 do I still open in 2026? Six things, in order of how often I open them.
1. The eval grid
A spreadsheet template — one row per test case, one column per prompt variant, cells contain the model's output and a confidence score. Sort by disagreement to find your edge cases fast. Boring. Indispensable.
2. The After Effects expression sheet
JSON config baked into the AE project, expressions read from it. See Templating broadcast for sanity for the long version.
3. The Figma → After Effects bridge
A Figma plugin that exports nested frames as Lottie-shaped JSON, plus an AE script that imports it. The motion test reel for Weave lives entirely inside this pipeline.
4. The reference scraper
A tiny shell script that pulls Are.na blocks into a single PDF, dated and sorted. I keep one open per active project.
5. The colour-tag swatch
A two-page Figma file with my full palette as named styles, tagged by emotion. Browse by feeling, copy the hex. Way faster than my brain.
6. The retro doc
A Notion template. Three columns — kept doing · stopped doing · started doing. Fill it out the last Friday of each month. The forced-stop column has been the most useful.
Half of these are CSVs. None of them are AI. The one tool I built with Claude this year was a transcript-cleaner I no longer use, because the model got good enough to do it inline.