Not long ago we removed our AI newsfeed. That topic’s ubiquity made it not just unnecessary but de trop, as the French like to say. Nonetheless, our colonization by artificial-intelligence platforms won’t stop any time soon if ever.
Starting three years ago today, No Contest has been linking to the excellent work of Ethan Mollick, whose “One Useful Thing” blog is both comprehensive and lucid. His most recent post is “An Opinionated Guide to Which AI to Use to Do Stuff.”
Mollick recommends giving AI platforms the keys to your computer, so to speak.
The most powerful way to use AI is to give it access to your computer. …
Why would you want an AI on your computer? Well, first it lets the AI do more complicated projects since it can work with many files over a longer period of time. This is incredibly useful, since you can ask for very ambitious outcomes. I shared a lot of things I built with Fable in Claude Code, but we can get more practical. I have a new book coming out in October (which you can pre-order). It has been through rounds of professional editing and proofreading, but I gave GPT-5.6 Sol in Codex the full PDF anyway and asked it to check it all over. The AI worked for 30 minutes, chased down 195 references, and gave me pages of notes that would have taken a team of researchers many hours.
One sign of how far AIs have come is that every one of the AI’s notes was accurate and there were no hallucinated page numbers, no invented text, no errors I could spot at all. In fact, I had the opposite issue: the AI was incredibly nitpicky.
It is always time to rethink things. The hard part is determining when to change them.
