April 17, 2025
LLMs Are a Tool, Not a Replacement for Thinking
I use LLMs daily. Claude Code is my daily-driver for engineering work and it’s in my IDE terminal constantly. I use Claude Projects for thinking through problems and working through complex decisions. Google’s NotebookLM has become my tool of choice for collecting and summarising research. I use Gemini for image generation. I’ve tried Cursor and Windsurf for IDE-integrated AI, and tend to reach for Cursor on personal projects alongside Claude Code. I’ve had several looks at ChatGPT over the past year and keep finding it less compelling each time.