Three AIs. One Brain. My Story.

Three AIs. One Brain. My Story.

How I learned to stop being confused by AI tools — and start using each one like a specialist.

There's a version of me from two years ago who would open a new browser tab every time he had a question — Google, Reddit, a YouTube rabbit hole, maybe a WhatsApp message to a friend who "knows stuff." That version of me spent a lot of energy just finding the door before even walking through it.

Then the AIs arrived. Not one. Not two. Three.
And suddenly I had three very different doors, each leading somewhere completely different. It took me a while to figure out which door was which. This is that story.
I want to be clear about something upfront: I don't use AI to replace thinking. I use it to extend it. There's a difference. And understanding that difference is what made me stop treating every AI tool the same way and start treating each one like a specialist I book an appointment with depending on what I need.
Let me introduce you to my three specialists.

🔵 Tool No. 1 — Perplexity
"The researcher who never sleeps and always cites their sources."
Imagine you need to understand a topic — not just skim it, but actually understand it enough to make a decision or form an opinion. Before Perplexity, I'd fall into the Google trap: ten tabs open, three contradicting each other, and me somehow ending up watching a documentary about something completely unrelated forty minutes later.
Perplexity changed that. My primary use for it is research — pure, clean, sourced research. When I'm trying to understand a market, a trend, a company, a concept, or even just a news story that feels incomplete, Perplexity is my first call. It searches the live web, synthesises what it finds, and — crucially — tells me where it got the information. That last part matters more than people realise. When you're building something, advising someone, or writing something, knowing your source isn't just academic. It's accountability.

"I don't use Perplexity to get answers. I use it to get orientation — a map of a topic before I decide which road to walk down."

One of my favourite flows: I type in a broad question — something like "what's happening in the African fintech space right now" — and Perplexity gives me a synthesis with live citations. Then I follow the threads that interest me. It's like having a research assistant who can speed-read the entire internet and hand you a briefing note in thirty seconds.
Is it perfect? No. Sometimes it misses nuance. Sometimes the sources it cites are contradictory and it doesn't flag that well. But as a starting point for any serious research session? It's the best I've found.
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My honest ratings:**
CategoryScoreResearch depth9.2 / 10Source reliability8.5 / 10Speed9.5 / 10Conversation feel5.5 / 10Overall utility8.8 / 10
Verdict: Perplexity is the tool I open when I need to know what's real. It's not my companion — it's my fact-checker, my research lead, my orientation device. If you're building anything serious and you're not using it for research, you're spending too much time lost in tabs.

🔴 Tool No. 2 — Claude
"The brilliant co-founder who has read everything you've ever written."
Here's what most people don't know about Claude, or at least what took me a while to discover: it's not just an AI you chat with. It's an AI you can build a context around. And for anyone working on a startup or a serious project, that difference is everything.
I use Claude specifically for startup work. Strategy, positioning, pitch decks, investor thinking, product decisions — the stuff that requires not just intelligence but context. And Claude has a feature that I've genuinely come to rely on: Projects.

I can upload multiple files — pitch decks, research documents, competitor analyses, internal memos, voice notes I've transcribed — and Claude reads all of it. Then when I ask a question, it's not answering in a vacuum. It's answering as someone who has read my actual material.

"Claude doesn't just know things. It knows my things. That's the difference that changes how you work."

Picture this: I'm preparing for a VC conversation. I've uploaded my deck, a market research document, a transcript of a previous investor call, and some notes I wrote at 2am about a pivot I'm considering. I ask Claude: "Given everything you've read, what's the weakest part of my narrative and how would a sceptical investor attack it?"
The answer I get isn't generic startup advice. It's specific, grounded in my actual documents, and often uncomfortably accurate.
That's not a search engine. That's a thinking partner. And for the kind of deep, nuanced, high-stakes thinking that startup-building demands, it's irreplaceable.

Claude also writes well. Beautifully, actually. When I need something to sound considered and precise — not just generated — Claude is where I go. There's a thoughtfulness in its prose that I haven't consistently found elsewhere.
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My honest ratings:**
CategoryScoreContextual memory (Projects)9.7 / 10Strategic thinking9.3 / 10Writing quality9.5 / 10Real-time information4.5 / 10Overall utility9.4 / 10
Verdict: If you're building something serious and you're not using Claude's Projects feature to upload and work through your actual documents, you're using maybe thirty percent of what it offers. This is where serious builders should live.

🟢 Tool No. 3 — ChatGPT
"The reliable friend who's always available and never makes it weird."
And then there's ChatGPT. My daily companion. The one I message the most — not for the deepest conversations, but for the most consistent ones.
I use ChatGPT for life admin, personal planning, and the kind of thinking-out-loud that doesn't require a specialist. What should I cook this week? Help me plan my schedule around this deadline. I need to draft a message to someone I had a disagreement with — help me strike the right tone. I want to think through this personal decision I'm sitting on.
ChatGPT handles all of it with an ease and warmth that makes it feel less like using a tool and more like texting a very competent friend.

"ChatGPT is the AI I use when I need to think out loud — and I don't want to feel silly doing it."

There's something about ChatGPT's personality that lends itself to casual use. It's conversational in a way that doesn't feel clinical. It meets you where you are. If I'm stressed and I type something slightly chaotic, it doesn't return something stiff and formal — it reads the room and responds accordingly. That's not a small thing. Over time, that consistent, warm availability becomes genuinely useful.

I also use it for quick, on-the-go tasks. Summarise this article. Turn these bullet points into a proper paragraph. Write three options for a subject line. Explain this concept like I'm new to it. These are five-minute tasks and ChatGPT handles them without ceremony. Open it, type, get the answer, move on. That frictionlessness is its own kind of superpower.

My honest ratings:
CategoryScoreConversational feel9.6 / 10Everyday versatility9.2 / 10Speed & ease of use9.4 / 10Deep strategic work6.8 / 10Overall utility9.1 / 10
Verdict: ChatGPT is the AI I'd recommend to someone who's just starting. It's approachable, reliable, and remarkably good at the everyday. Don't underestimate "everyday" — it covers more of your life than you think.

The real lesson isn't which AI is "best." It's that none of them are the same.
The mistake most people make is picking one AI and expecting it to be everything. It's like hiring one person and expecting them to be your accountant, your lawyer, your therapist, and your assistant simultaneously. That's not how specialists work, and increasingly, that's not how AI works either.
I think of my three tools as a team:

Perplexity goes first — it orients me, gives me the landscape, tells me what's real.
Claude goes deep — it knows my context, challenges my thinking, helps me build the hard stuff.
ChatGPT keeps me grounded — it's the daily touchpoint, the planner, the sounding board, the companion.

Together, they cover most of what I need a thinking partner for. Not perfectly. Not without missteps. But consistently well enough that I genuinely can't imagine working the way I used to. The chaos of ten open tabs, the WhatsApp messages asking friends questions they're too polite to say they can't answer, the hours lost to Google rabbit holes — all of that has been replaced by something that, most days, just works.
Find your three doors. Learn which one leads where. And stop using the wrong one just because it was the first one you found.

Thanks for reading. If this resonated, I'd love to know which AI tools you're using and how you split the work between them — drop it in the comments.