Tool / Toy / Trash

Tool/Toy/Trash is a three-second triage for any AI product, workflow, or subscription. A tool made your life measurably better — you could justify, out loud, that using it beats not using it. A toy is fun and honest about it, and does nothing profitable — which is allowed. Trash wears the costume of a tool: it produces something, it looks busy, and it takes more than it gives. The market sells all three at the same price, with the same demo.

Why it matters: The buckets are time-stamped verdicts, not permanent labels, and things migrate for two reasons: the use changes (fun images become marketing content that converts) or the technology crosses a capability line (image generators lived in the toy bucket for years, until models learned text and consistency and whole categories of use crossed at once). So the triage is always about this thing, for you, right now — and most failed AI builds are a toy or a piece of trash that somebody mistook for a tool.