I saved 4,774 links over the years. Here are the 1,000 worth keeping.
Every developer and designer I know has the same problem: a bookmarks bar that turned into a junk drawer. Mine had 3,305 bookmarks and 1,469 GitHub stars. I never opened most of them twice.
So I built ToolOS to clean it up. Here's what I found once I looked at all 4,774 at once, and how 1,000 of them made the cut.
About 1 in 18 links was already dead
ToolOS checks every link in the background. 260 of my saves were completely dead: the domain was gone, or the page returned an error. Hundreds more now redirect somewhere else, usually because the product was acquired, renamed or shut down.
That's the quiet cost of bookmarking: the tool you remember isn't the one that's there anymore. So every link in the directory shows its status, and the check runs again automatically.
A lot of what I saved didn't belong in public
Years of saving everything means saving things I'd never recommend: old forum threads, login pages, sketchy marketing panels, and pages that only made sense on the day I saved them. About 700 were automatically held back for safety or spam reasons before I even started picking.
For the rest, an AI model scored every website on one question: would someone be glad to discover this? Only tools that scored well made it in, with one entry per site, so you don't see five pages from the same domain.
Search by the job, not the name
The best part of a big library is also the worst: you know you saved something for this, but not what it was called. In ToolOS you describe the task, like 'turn a blog post into a short video' or 'remove the background from a product photo', and it picks the three best matches and says why.
What's in the first 1,000
Roughly 390 AI tools, 200 developer tools, 110 design tools, and a long tail of productivity, marketing, learning and security tools. No GitHub repos for now; they get their own space later.
50 of them are free for everyone to browse. The full 1,000 are part of ToolOS Pro, coming soon.
If your bookmarks look like mine did, you can import them (Chrome, Firefox, Safari or Edge export, plus your GitHub stars). Everything stays private until you choose to publish it.