An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff

According to Simon Willison's Weblog, AI analyst Ethan Mollick has significantly revamped his guide on which systems to use—a year ago it centered on chat models, but the landscape is now dominated by agentic systems, where AI can autonomously complete hours of work in a single session. The catalyst is giving these systems access to your computer through dedicated modes. ChatGPT provides Work and Codex; Claude offers Cowork and Code. The catch: these same-named modes operate differently on web versus desktop, creating what amounts to spectacularly unintuitive naming conventions. Google's Gemini has fallen from Mollick's recommendations entirely because the company still lacks a competitive agentic offering in the same category.

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