I called GPT a nerd on Reddit. Someone replied that GPT is a rogue. We were both right — and understanding why changed how I think about choosing AI models.
Where this started
I'm a frontend engineer, and at this point almost none of my code is written by hand. I manage an AI, review its implementation, tweak the occasional style rule. Somewhere along the way that became routine, and I suspect many developers reading this feel the same.
Living inside these tools all day, you start noticing something that benchmarks don't capture: each model feels like a different person.
For me it goes roughly like this. GPT is a nerd — deeply knowledgeable, precise, a little rigid. Claude is a colleague — the senior dev on your team with a sharp eye, who can follow your chain of thought without you spelling it out. Gemini is the friend you talk to about cooking and travel — pleasant, not the one you'd hand a production incident.
