If You Could Only Have One AI Assistant, Choose ChatGPT

If there’s only one AI tool you pay for, make it ChatGPT.

I’m guilty of letting my SaaS bloat. Today, I pay for several tools — Spotify, VPN, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc. Luckily, my AI tool stable is kept to a minimum. I only pay for ChatGPT and Adobe Firefly Image (via my Adobe Creative Cloud subscription).

Unless you want to spend a ton of money, it’s possible to just keep your AI tools down to one and then just use the free tier for the rest of the AI tools. At the same time, you might also need to find workaround methods to bridge the gaps in capabilities. Take these three leading AI tools: OpenAI ChatGPT, Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude.

I have been paying for ChatGPT for a while now and will continue to do so. It’s still the best tool out there. But Claude and Gemini both have some advantages.

Finding workarounds

However, Claude recently came out with Artifacts, and that was a game changer. Being able to code stuff and visualize it on the same page is a huge benefit.

One problem: using an AI to code stuff takes many iterations. You might need small changes to your code (e,g, “change the button’s colour to green”). These little changes count towards your free prompts. For more complex coding, you will find that the number of free prompts to be inadequate.

What’s the solution? Pay for unlimited prompts and let your SaaS bloat? Nope, my solution was to find a workaround.

The problem with ChatGPT is that you can’t visualize its output. It will spit code out but to see what the code looks like, you would have to find a platform to run it on.

I used to run it in VS Code but now I run it on Replit. Replit allows you to paste code in a web-based code editor and run it. You can’t deploy it unless you pay, which I don’t want to, so I use Netlify to deploy.

By the way, I find this to be worth it because I have more faith in ChatGPT giving better outputs than Claude.

Workaround: Gemini can summarize YouTube, ChatGPT can’t.

You can just paste a YouTube URL and get Gemini to summarize it for you. ChatGPT can’t.

OK, so do we just give up and pay up? No — never let your SaaS bloat.

In YouTube, you can find a transcript. Copy that into ChatGPT’s prompt area and ask it to summarize the video.

I find this particularly useful when you have a rambling YouTuber who takes 60 minutes to get to the point.

It can also help if you see a clickbait title and want to know what the context around the clickbait is.