The Reach Test
Judge whether an AI tool is truly useful by whether you reach for it unprompted each morning.
- Difficulty
- Starter
- Time to result
- ~days to results
- Steps
- 3
- Confidence
- 85%
A one-question heuristic for cutting through hype about a new AI tool: forget the demos and benchmarks and ask whether you organically reach for it when you wake up. If a tool has crossed from novelty into genuine utility, you use it without being told to. This lets an early adopter spot which experimental tools are actually ready to build a workflow around.
Origin
Coined internally at Every by Dan Shipper as the phrase his team uses to decide if a new AI tool has become genuinely useful.
Core principles
- 01Real utility shows up as unprompted, habitual reaching, not forced experimentation
- 02Demos and benchmarks overstate usefulness; daily pull is the honest signal
- 03An early adopter's edge is noticing what they organically keep returning to
How to run it
- 1
Adopt the tool honestly for real work
Put the new tool into your actual daily workflow rather than a contrived test, so the signal reflects genuine need.
Pro tip Try each new model or tool the moment it ships — that's when you can be one of the first to discover what it's good for.
- 2
Watch whether you reach for it organically
Notice, without forcing it, whether you instinctively open the tool in the morning to get work done. Organic reaching is the pass condition.
Watch out Don't confuse FOMO-driven usage (using it because you're afraid of missing out) with genuine reaching — the former is not the signal.
- 3
Build workflow around passers, shelve the rest
Tools that pass the reach test are ready to standardize around; ones you have to force yourself to open are not yet ready — turn the rock over again when the next version ships.
Pro tip Keep re-testing shelved tools on each new release; something that fails today often passes in a later version.
In the wild
Shipper tried Claude Code when it came out, found it obviously useful even before it was 'ready,' and started reaching for it to do his own writing — the organic pull told him it was a genuine shift, not hype.
→ He wrote about it publicly a year before the mainstream caught on, and it became one of his most popular posts.
Common mistakes
Trusting benchmarks over daily behavior
Benchmarks make tools look more capable and autonomous than they are; only whether you actually reach for the tool reveals real-world usefulness.
Forcing usage out of fear
Using a tool because of job-loss FOMO produces false positives — you're not reaching for it because it helps, so it tells you nothing about the tool's real value.
Is it for you?
Best for
Early adopters and operators trying to separate genuinely useful new AI tools from hype before committing a workflow to them
Not ideal for
Teams that need a rigorous, quantified evaluation for a formal procurement or compliance decision
From the transcript
“one of the things that we talk about internally is what I call the reach test, which is like, do you just like, when you…”
“it's obviously useful for me”
From the episode
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Dan Shipper