This is my list of the AI tools I use or am keeping an eye on.
Last updated: November 10, 2024
General Purpose AI
All these tools are good for most types of tasks. I find it worth the money to have a paid subscription to at least one of them.
Anthropic Claude: Currently the Claude Sonnet 3.5 (new) model is the one I use the most frequently from Anthropic.
ChatGPT: Currently GPT 4o works great for most tasks. The o1-preview model can be better for some more complicated questions that require multi-step “reasoning”, but I rarely start with it.
Google Gemini: Gemini Advanced has a much larger context window than Sonnet 3.5 and 4o. For general purpose uses that require a lot of input or output, this can make Gemini the better choice.
Specific Use Cases
Analyzing Long Text
Because of Gemini Advanced’s large context window, I usually start with it if I have large documents that require analysis. The results are usually better with Gemini, but it sometimes fails to parse really large documents. When that happens, I typically try to break the input document up into smaller chunks and use Claude or 4o.
Software Engineering
Anthropic Claude: Claude’s “Projects” allow for uploading source code. The more integrated development environments below are better if you’re going to be modifying and maintaining code. If you can have only one tool, or if have only sporadic needs for software engineering help, Claude works great.
Cursor: This is a fork of VSCode, so is very familiar to anyone who has used VSCode, and is my go-to for AI-enabled software development.
Replit: The advantage to Replit is in their AI tool that writes code but also configures infrastructure and deploys it. It’s great for prototyping applications.
v0: An AI tool created by the cloud web app hosting company Vercel, v0 is good for creating front-end applications.
bolt: One of the newest generation of full stack app generators. I haven’t used it extensively but am one that I’m keeping an eye on.
create: Another of the newest generation of full stack app generators. I haven’t used it extensively but am one that I’m keeping an eye on.
Galileo AI: Another of the newest generation of full stack app generators. I haven’t used it extensively but am one that I’m keeping an eye on.
Image Generation
Flux.1: The best AI image generator in my opinion.
Midjourney: The OG of image generation. It’s still very good.
DALL-E as part of ChatGPT: Images can be generated from within ChatGPT prompts now, using OpenAI’s DALL-E model. The results are not as good as Flux.1 or Midjourney in my opinion, but they work for some basic needs.