How to Test a New AI Tool in 15 Minutes (and Reject Most of Them)
New AI tools launch daily. Most deserve five minutes, not a trial week. This is the evaluation we run before any tool earns a write-up here — it fits in fifteen minutes and rejects about four out of five candidates.
Minutes 0-5: one real task
Ignore the demo data. Bring one task from your actual week — a real email, a real spreadsheet, a real bug. Marketing demos are choreographed; your mess is not. If the tool fumbles a real task in its best-case onboarding, that is the review.
Minutes 5-10: three failure probes
- The edge case: give it input that is slightly malformed. Graceful error or confident nonsense?
- The repeat: run the same task twice. Consistent output is a product; random output is a slot machine.
- The undo: make a mistake on purpose. If there is no undo, the tool is charging you tuition.
Minutes 10-15: the two questions that matter
Export: can you get your data out in a standard format? If your work only exists inside the tool, you are building on rented ground — fine for toys, expensive for habits.
The delta: is this meaningfully better than what you already use, or different? "Different" wears off in a week; "better" compounds.
Verdict rule: a tool that passes gets a week of real use before it earns a recommendation. Tools that fail any probe get named in our tools coverage only when the failure pattern is common enough to be useful.