For a while now AI has been a curiosity for me.

This weekend it because something else. I think my conception of the ‘tool’ was that it was hype but no real substance yet. It had a while to go before it could do anything meaningful in my life - much less actually having an impact on my life.

Then I tried Claude.

Until this weekend I had essentially dabbled in Co-Pilot at work, ChatGPT on occasion and Gemini during google searches. I tried Deepseek when it first came out and it was, meh - nothing spectacular, similar structure to a ChatGPT (although I like the open source element to it all). I hesitate to add Siri into this, but Siri is a stupid, stupid AI assistant. Apple clearly have no idea what they’re doing in this space.

Back to Claude.

Claude was different. It doesn’t add superfluous word salad in the responses - trying to pad things out. I used it to help me sort out a complicated element of my taxes. I then asked it to help me with some bios for my CV at work. I then asked it for some coding help. And it not only delivered on all of these tasks, it legitimately did a good job. While other reached garbage-60% useful, the outputs where consistently hovering at the 90% useful.

I liken this moment to when I first discovered the internet. And to bring the analogy full circle, ChatGPT/Gemini/etc are to Claude, as Yahoo!/AskJeeves/Microsoft Search is to Google.