Most directories pretend they don't have opinions. The data is "neutral". The scores are "objective". The user is left to draw their own conclusions, which is a polite way of saying: we don't want to be liable for any of this.
I went the other way. Every tool in the archive now gets a one-paragraph take, written in the first person, signed by me. You can read mine on Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, NotebookLM, and a growing list of others. There will be more by the end of the month.
Why
Because the alternative is dishonest. A "neutral" review of a tool I use every day is a review I didn't actually write — it's a summary of marketing copy filtered through politeness. The thing that makes a directory worth reading is the same thing that makes a magazine worth reading: someone with skin in the game made a call, on the record, with their name on it.
I am writing for the version of you who already knows the obvious things. You don't need me to tell you Claude is "a powerful AI assistant from Anthropic." You can read the homepage. You need me to tell you whether the prose is the cleanest in the market (it is), whether the refusal behaviour is annoying (sometimes), whether the pricing leaves you whole at the end of the month (mostly).
How it relates to the score
Sometimes the score and the take disagree. That's intentional.
The score is a five-axis grid built from a fixed rubric. The methodology page shows you exactly what each axis weighs. It's the kind of number you can use to filter the directory and trust the filtering. It is also a number, and numbers always lose something.
The take captures the thing the number can't. The way a model breaks down on long context. The specific UX habit that makes one tool feel like home and another feel like a hotel. The reason you might pay double for the version that doesn't have analytics baked into the chat.
When the take says "I cancelled and came back twice" about a tool with an 80+ score, that's not a contradiction. It's the part of the review the score isn't allowed to know.
What's still missing
Not every tool has a take yet. Some are tools I haven't used long enough to have an honest opinion. Some are tools I've used so much I haven't figured out how to be brief about them. The list grows when the opinion is ready, not when the calendar says so.
If you've spent serious time with a tool that doesn't have a take yet, email me. I'll listen.
— Moon