AI chat

An AI chat is an app where you type, or talk, to an artificial intelligence as if it were a conversation, and it answers with text and sometimes with images or files. The best known are ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek or Copilot, and any of them will do to get started: what matters is trying it with real tasks.

What's confusing is that they all look the same on the outside and aren't on the inside: what changes is the model that answers, what it remembers from previous conversations, whether it can search the internet or read your documents and what it does with what you write. A basic tip: don't paste in personal or client data without first checking its privacy policy. And chat has its limits: it's for thinking, writing and asking, but when you want something done automatically and repeatedly you usually need another tool, like an agent.

I use the chats of several different AIs, although today a good part of my work goes through agents and harnesses. That's precisely why I asked myself the question in the title of "Are chats still useful?", where I explain how I split work between chat, agent and harness and when it still pays for me to open a chat window.