An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff

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• Covers Ethan Mollick’s guide, which has shifted from simple chat-tool recommendations toward agentic systems capable of autonomously doing many hours of real work in one go.
• Willison notes ChatGPT and Claude both now ship desktop agent modes with computer access (ChatGPT’s Work/Codex, Claude’s Cowork/Code), and calls the cross-platform naming “spectacularly unintuitive” since mobile apps reuse the same mode names but behave differently.
• Notable omission: Gemini has dropped off the recommended list entirely because Google still lacks an agent-mode offering comparable to ChatGPT’s or Claude’s.
• Practical takeaway: to get real agentic value from these tools you need the desktop apps with agent mode enabled, not the web chat interface — but expect naming confusion between platforms.