I’ve been cheating on Claude with ChatGPT, and I have thoughts.
When ChatGPT launched its rival to Claude’s cowork and skills, I figured I should actually test it properly instead of having opinions from the sidelines. So I ran both, daily, for weeks. Real client work, real admin, real 9pm what-am-I-doing-with-my-life questions. Not a demo. Not one of those “10 prompts to try!!” tests where someone plays with it for an hour and writes a listicle.
Right. Verdict.
Claude is the grumpy best mate
Claude is the friend you’ve known for twenty years. Comfortable. Knows where everything is. Does what you need without fuss, and occasionally does it its own way anyway because it’s decided it knows better. Sometimes it does know better, which is the most annoying part.
The thing I rate most is that it pushes back. I bring it a half-baked idea and it tells me which half is baked. When you’re building stuff that has to hold real weight, real money, real clients, that push-back is worth more than any shiny feature. I don’t need a yes. I’ve got a mirror for that.
ChatGPT is the cheerleader
ChatGPT is lovely. Everything is amazing. Everything is awesome. Keep going babe, you’re smashing it.
Which feels great, right up until you clock that it’s been agreeing with you all the way into a dead end. You bring it a bad idea and it helps you make the bad idea more efficient. You learn to filter it, same as you learn to filter the friend who says every haircut looks incredible.
Slightly nicer interface, I’ll give it that. But when I needed telling that something wasn’t working, it was always the last to say so.
Here’s the actual point though
This isn’t really a versus post, because honestly? It does not matter which one you use.
I mean it. If you don’t have the process, the goal and the foundations sorted before you open either of them, you are not automating your business. You’re adding more chaos to the fire, just faster than you could have managed by hand.
I watch it happen all the time. A woman who’s already drowning pays her £20 a month, opens the shiny thing, and asks it to fix a business she hasn’t had a chance to properly look at herself. And it can’t. Not because the AI is rubbish. Because it doesn’t know what she knows, and she hasn’t had a minute to work out what she actually wants from it.
The tool was never the thing. The questions you bring it are the thing. What is this business for? What do I do, in what order? What’s eating my time that shouldn’t be? Sort those first and either tool becomes brilliant. Skip them and both become a very confident way of being busy.
Fine, which one though
Okay, if you’re making me choose: I’m a Claude person and my whole business runs on it. I like a tool that argues with me. The grumpy best mate has caught more of my mistakes than the cheerleader ever has.
(And yes, I’m keeping both subscriptions for now. Research. Honest.)
But foundations first, tool second. Always that way round.
And if the foundations are the bit you’ve been skipping, that’s literally my job. I Can See Clearly Now is two hours, one to one, me in your business, working out what’s actually going on before any robot gets involved. You leave knowing what to fix, in what order, and where AI genuinely fits, which is worth more than any subscription you’re currently paying for.