Adopt the category, not the provider

Dear network: there is temptation to save money with annual subscriptions for AI providers.

Don’t.

Four things:

1. If you’re on a paid Anthropic/Claude and feeling unhappy, try going (back?) to ChatGPT. Or vice versa.

2. In doing this exercise, you will see my point. OpenAI offers better models and better apps right now than Anthropic.

   But, IMO, this also has only been true for like a month? And will probably change again in another month.

   The winner will keep changing.

3. You’ve probably already heard this advice, but when you do a switching exercise, you will see why:

   Don’t rely on the chat history being your source of truth: have AI write you little documents (or write them yourself) and keep them in a folder.

   It makes switching providers easier while keeping you organized.

4. Don’t rely on minor features of these providers. “OpenAI has ‘dots’, Claude can ‘schedule a remote task’ ” or whatever their flavor of the month is.

   Like Google did to us growing up, they’ll keep releasing these little experiments to try and hook you, then decide something doesn’t work and can it.

   Fun to try, not to depend on.

Using a chatbot ever day is a new software category.

Adopt the category, not the provider.