My dad always told me to use the right tool for the job. I think about that a lot now, working with four different models that each do something better than the others.
Here’s what’s in my toolkit right now:
- Google Gemini 3 — UI design and image creation
- Anthropic Claude Opus 4.5 — coding and business problem-solving
- OpenAI GPT-5.2 — complex, long-running problems
- xAI Grok 4 — news and current events
Gemini 3
Specifically Nano Banana Pro. It’s where I go for quick, professional UI mockups and image generation. The more detailed your prompt, the better the result. This one rewards specificity in a way the others don’t quite. I use it for site mockups, marketing collateral, and social content. It’s solid at general tasks too, but UI work is where it pulls ahead.
Claude Opus 4.5
My daily driver. Paired with Claude Code, it generates higher-quality code than anything else I’ve used. Not perfect, but the gap to second place is wide. It’s also where I go to think out loud: brainstorming, working through business problems, pressure-testing ideas. The combination of code quality and reasoning is what keeps it on top.
GPT-5.2
OpenAI doesn’t get much of my time these days, but when Claude is stuck on a hard coding problem, a second opinion from GPT often unsticks it. The output is high quality. The latency is the catch — noticeably slower than the others, which makes it feel less suited to interactive work.
Grok 4
The underrated one. With live access to posts on X, it returns the most current information on news and events. If you need to know what’s happening right now — markets moving, a breaking story, what people are saying about an announcement — Grok is the one.