Read three AI tool roundups, but the work still ends up in WorkBuddy

These past couple of days I came across another 2026 must-have AI tools for PMs roundup—Claude writes PRDs, Notion AI manages the knowledge base, Miro draws collaborative whiteboards—each one pretty capable. My takeaway after reading: the article isn't wrong, but it doesn't tell the whole story. The tools are stronger, but the work I do every day hasn't gotten less, because the work is scattered across different tools and I have to carry it from one to another by hand. The PRD Claude writes has to be manually pasted into the meeting notes, the requirements decided in the meeting notes have to be manually typed into a spreadsheet, and the screenshots the spreadsheet needs have to be manually dug out of folders. The roundup compares how fast each tool runs on its own; nobody compares how many trips I make carrying things in between.

I've used WorkBuddy for two months. At first I also just treated it as a document tool, but later I realized its position is a bit different. It strings several steps into a line, standing at the entrance position—any single step may not be the strongest.

Let me describe a scenario I run every week. Every Wednesday after the product review meeting, I have a folder containing meeting notes, requirement pool screenshots, and a few competitor PDFs, all named messily. Before, I'd spend over an hour mashing them into a requirements summary table. Now I let it do it.

Open WorkBuddy, click Workspace in the left sidebar, then click New Task, and in the template list select the File Organization & Table Generation category. Inside, the interface is split into three parts: input area on the left, instruction box in the middle, output preview on the right. I drag the whole folder directly into the left input area; it lists the files itself, each with a small status dot after it—green means read, gray means still queued. This step takes about ten-odd seconds.

The key is the instruction box in the middle. This is where I stepped in a pit. The first time, to save effort, I wrote "organize these into a requirements summary table," and the resulting table's columns were scrambled—the third column was filled with the second column's content. I even posted asking if I'd fed it too much mixed stuff, but on review I found the instruction was too vague: the input mixed PDFs and screenshots, so it guessed on its own, and guessing led to chaos.

Now I write the instruction very rigidly: output one table, five columns, in order: requirement name, source, priority, owner, remarks; requirement name only from the meeting notes; screenshots only as reference for priority judgment, do not generate requirement names out of thin air from screenshots; source column filled with the file name; fields not mentioned left blank, do not fill in yourself. Writing "what not to do" into it is more effective than only writing "what to do."

Below the instruction box there's Output Settings; I select Excel Table and specify a fixed save path. Then click Run in the bottom right, and the preview area on the right produces results in about a minute or two. Don't rush to save when it comes out—glance at whether the columns are right, especially the remarks column; sometimes it stuffs the chit-chat from the meeting notes in there too.

On the configuration side I did two more things. First, I saved this instruction as an Instruction Template—there's a Save as Template in the top right of the instruction box; name it "Weekly Meeting Requirements Summary" and call it directly next week without rewriting. Second, I fixed the output path to a folder synced to WeCom Docs, so when it's done it's automatically in the shared drive.

Collaboration and permissions I split like this. The summary table goes in a shared folder in WeCom Docs; the master table is editable only by me and one other product person, and I send a read-only link to the dev side. Before the review I drop the link in the group; whoever has comments comments in the doc without touching the original table. This avoids the old mess where anyone could edit and after editing nobody knew who changed what. My environment is the Windows desktop version; I haven't tested on Mac—the permissions interface may be a bit different, so it may not apply to everyone.

Daily maintenance is just two things. Before each run, clear the old files in the output directory—sometimes it reads last week's old table as input too. I learned this the hard way once: the output table was mixed with requirements already cut last week. Every Friday spend ten minutes going through the tables generated this week, fill in empty remarks, don't let them pile up—by month's end the accounts won't match.

Back to that roundup. I think this kind of single-product roundup will become increasingly pointless, because the gap between the top few tools in single capabilities is narrowing—what Claude can write, Notion AI is not far off. Whether you can string the scattered steps into a line—that's where the gap lies. From the second half of 2026 onward, the PM toolbox will most likely shift from "a bunch of strongest single products" to "one entrance plus several capabilities it invokes." The value of tools like WorkBuddy lies in standing at the entrance position, not in how strong any single item is.

As for which single product is strongest, my current view is that it's a false question.