It's not just the AI models anymore as well as. On top of that, there's a lot of AI agentic/agentless tools (VSCode extensions, VSCode forks, new IDEs), CLI tools, web pages (looking at you notebookLM) that all seems to be provide very similar but a bit different things that is supposedly to be best in their field.
This is not touching on the actual products people integrate AIs nicely into at all yet!
As a min/max oriented person, I feel terrible eventhough I have learned more and built prototypes more than I have done ever.
How are you all coping with this? What are some advices or workflows people are doing?
I have another one that returns latest AI research updates, but it is less helpful. I need to reengineer that request some. https://chatgpt.com/share/e/682ddc8e-5298-8002-ad19-6d2a567c...
What helped me: realizing that AI isn’t about using the “best” tool — it’s about using any tool to free up your mind for deeper thinking.
Most of these tools do variations of the same thing: reduce friction. Delegate mechanics. Compress effort. They’re cognitive accelerators — not destinations.
The key shift for me was focusing on ideas, not tools. Concepts, not configs. That changed the game from “what am I missing?” to “what do I want to build?”
Once you internalize that, the chaos becomes background noise — and the signal gets stronger.
I keep on top of the desired result - my mediums are code, images and 3D renders. I'm critical of my own work, let alone AI, so I'll never use Cursor et al. The act of copy pasting is a proxy for quality control.
That said, Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini are plenty for me right now. I downloaded the ChatGPT OS X first, so that gets used the most. Gemini gives better results, but I often forget that's a choice.
I have a toolbelt as an engineer. These are tools.
When I need the right tool for the job and it’s not on my toolbelt, I add it by ramping up quickly and figuring it out. There are enough tools on the belt to craft this new tool.
When I was young, I had the illusion that I was or could.
You can miss out on opportunities. If it never was an opportunity, you didn't miss out.
Experts have forefront opportunities in their respective fields. Non-experts are on the back of the wave and don't. Or to put it another way, when you read the latest paper you are a year or more behind the people who wrote it.
What matters is what matters. And what matters is the things you make, not the tools you use. Good luck.