An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff
An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff. It's interesting watching the evolution of Ethan Mollick's guide over time. A year ago it was still all about chat - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - with o3, Claude 4 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro as the models and Deep Research as a useful alternative mode.
- ▪An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff.
- ▪It's interesting watching the evolution of Ethan Mollick's guide over time.
- ▪A year ago it was still all about chat - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - with o3, Claude 4 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro as the models and Deep Research as a useful alternative mode.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 18 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff — Simon Willison's Weblog
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 2,620 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Simon Willison’s Weblog |
| Canonical URL | https://simonwillison.net/2026/Jul/27/an-opinionated-guide-to-which-ai-to-use-to-do-stuff/ |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Jul 2026 15:42:41 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-28T15:55:26.490Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-28T15:55:26.490Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | luezBCvw8xle · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
An opinionated guide to which AI to use to do stuff. It's interesting watching the evolution of Ethan Mollick's guide over time. A year ago it was still all about chat - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - with o3, Claude 4 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro as the models and Deep Research as a useful alternative mode. Today it's much more about agentic systems - "where the AI is capable of doing the equivalent of many hours of real human work in one go". Gemini has fallen off Ethan's list, since Google still doesn’t have an established entry in the Codex/ChatGPT Work/Cowork category.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Simon Willison’s Weblog.
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