I'm not a coder. Everything you see here, and the six apps on the AI page, exists because I learned to work with AI instead of just chatting with it. Here's what that looks like day to day.

ChatGPT was a therapist and a friend for a quick minute. Then it told me things that weren't true, and it took me a while to understand why: it's built to please, and a people pleaser will tell you what keeps you coming back. I still use it, for image generation and for a second opinion when I want to check whether an idea holds up. I just don't confide in it anymore.

Claude is where I plan and build. It's the difference between having ideas and shipping them. The projects stay on track, which was never my strength. I don't buy subscriptions for my own tooling anymore; I have Claude build a dashboard that shows me where everything stands.

Perplexity Pro is for deep research. I have Claude or ChatGPT write the research prompt, run it through Perplexity, then feed the results back in. That loop is how the research-heavy parts of my platforms get built.

Gemini Pro has replaced about 80% of my Google searches.

Mistral I keep around to see what a privacy-first AI produces. It's a useful contrast.

Grok gives me the less filtered take. Grok Bot is where I go to think about where all this is heading, for us as a civilization, in businesses, and for me as one person in both.

What I didn't expect is how fast everything else caught up. Tools I've used for years now have AI in them, and most of them are better for it. The platforms are embracing it, and the ones that do it well get a lot more useful.

That's the setup. The rest of these notes will be what comes out of it.