I want to be upfront: this is not a sponsored post. I have no affiliate deals with any of these companies. These are just the tools I open every single day versus the ones that are still installed but haven't been touched since November.

What's Actually Open Right Now

Claude (claude.ai) — Daily, multiple times

My primary AI assistant for anything requiring extended thinking, code review, writing, and complex multi-step reasoning. I use Claude Sonnet for most tasks (the cost/quality ratio is hard to beat) and switch to Opus when I need genuinely deep analysis. The biggest advantage over ChatGPT for my work: Claude is significantly better at holding a complex codebase in context and reasoning about it holistically.

Claude Code — Several times a week

Terminal-native coding assistant. The use case where it absolutely shines for me is refactoring: "move all database queries out of these controllers and into a service layer." That's a cross-file operation that IDEs struggle with and that Claude Code handles reasonably well. It's not magic, and you can't trust it to not break something — I always review the diffs — but it's dramatically faster than doing it by hand.

Cursor — For focused coding sessions

I know, everyone's talking about Cursor. It earned the hype for one specific reason: it's the first IDE integration where the AI completions feel like they understand the whole project, not just the current file. The autocomplete hits at a rate that actually changes how I write code. I don't use it for everything — I'm still often in VS Code out of habit — but for focused feature work it's become my default.

Perplexity — For research

Search with sources. I use it when I need current information with citations — library release notes, framework comparisons, recent benchmark results. ChatGPT and Claude have knowledge cutoffs and can hallucinate on recent topics. Perplexity at least cites where it's getting information, which makes it easier to verify.

Tools I Got Excited About That I Barely Use

GitHub Copilot

I have a subscription. I use it maybe twice a week. The inline completions are good but not noticeably better than Cursor's now, and Cursor has a much better chat interface. I'm not cancelling it yet, but I'm not sure I'd subscribe if I were starting fresh today.

Every "AI-native" browser I tried

Arc with AI features, Dia, a few others I won't name. They were all interesting for about two days. Then I went back to Chrome because every AI assistant works in Chrome anyway, and the browser itself doesn't add enough to justify the switch.

Notion AI

Great for people who live in Notion. I tried to become a Notion person twice. The AI features worked fine. I still take notes in a combination of Obsidian and Markdown files like some kind of developer dinosaur.

The Honest Answer to "Which AI Should I Use?"

For code: Claude Code or Cursor depending on whether you're working in the terminal or an IDE. For general reasoning and writing: Claude. For current research with sources: Perplexity. For everything else: pick one and get good at it. The switching cost between AI tools is real — you lose context, you lose your prompt history, you lose the mental model you've built for how the tool behaves. Pick a primary tool and stick with it long enough to actually get skilled at using it.