For the first six months I used AI seriously, I had four tabs open at all times. ChatGPT in one. Claude in another. Perplexity for research. Whatever new thing was getting press that week in the fourth.
Every time I had a question, I’d pick whichever felt right. Or sometimes I’d ask the same question to two of them and compare. I told myself this was thorough. What it actually was, was inefficient and a little obsessive.
The breaking point came when I noticed I was spending more time deciding which tool to use than I was getting value from any of them. So I made a deal with myself. Ninety days. One tool. ChatGPT, because it’s where I’d started. No checking in on the others. No reading articles about what was new. Just use the one and see what happens.
Three things happened that I didn’t expect.
First, my prompts got dramatically better. Not because I worked at it. Because using one tool consistently lets you build a feel for what works in that tool — its strengths, its weaknesses, the way it handles certain kinds of questions, the prompts that consistently produce good answers. That feel is invisible when you’re tool-hopping because you’re always re-calibrating to a different tool’s personality.
Second, the tool started feeling like a colleague rather than a search engine. After enough conversations, ChatGPT started having context about what I was working on, what I cared about, how I liked information presented. The features that lean on memory — and most AI tools have these now — only really pay off when you commit to one tool long enough for that history to accumulate.
Third, and this was the unexpected one — I stopped feeling FOMO about the tools I wasn’t using. I’d been carrying around a low-grade anxiety that I might be missing some better tool. The minute I stopped checking, the anxiety disappeared. I was getting useful work done. That was enough.
At the end of the ninety days, I tried Claude again. It was good. It’s still good. I now use both — ChatGPT for general work and Claude for serious writing. But I would not have gotten there by hopping back and forth from day one. I got there by going deep with one first.
If you’re trying to figure out AI and you have three tools open right now: close two of them. Pick the one you’ll use for the next thirty days. Then revisit. The skill comes from depth, not breadth.
I wish somebody had told me this six months earlier. So now I’m telling you.