We started Best of AI about a year ago as a curated list of AI tools worth using. Today the whole thing is open source on GitHub — data, site, scripts, CI. Community-driven from here on out.

Flat files, no database

Every tool is a Markdown file in content/tools/. Categories live in data/categories.yaml. The leaderboard ranks tools from data/leaderboard.yaml. No Postgres, no headless CMS, no vendor lock-in. Clone the repo, git grep for what you need, send a PR when something’s wrong. That’s the whole model.

The site is a Hugo static build. HTML, CSS, a bit of vanilla JS. Push to main, a GitHub Action runs hugo --minify, and the result lands on GitHub Pages. No server to babysit.

GitHub Actions do the boring stuff

Three workflows worth knowing about:

• Deploy — builds and publishes on every push to main
• Issue → PR — open a tool submission issue with the right template and issue-review.py validates it, opens a branch, and files a PR
• Update README — regenerates README.md from the tool files whenever the data changes

Submit a tool via issue or PR. Fix a description by editing one Markdown file. Argue about leaderboard rankings in data/leaderboard.yaml. All reviewable, all in git history.

Leaderboard, professions, and the rest

The leaderboard is a ranked shortlist — tools we think are genuinely good, not just popular. Rankings are data, not vibes: edit the YAML, open a PR, make your case.

Profession pages group tools by role — developers, designers, marketers, writers, and 200+ more. Each profession file lists category slugs; Hugo pulls matching tools automatically. Add a profession the same way you’d add a tool: Markdown file, PR, done.

Search is client-side. The header modal fetches /index.json — a JSON index built at compile time. Fork the data, build your own UI, plug it into whatever you want. No API key.

Come hack on it

If you like directories that live in git, static sites that deploy themselves, and directories you can actually send a patch to — this is for you.

• Contribute — how to submit tools, fix listings, improve rankings
• GitHub repo — clone it, break it, fix it, PR it

The directory is free to browse. The code and data are yours to fork. We’d rather have a hundred people improving the list than one person gatekeeping it.