Gemini
Google's AI assistant. The ambient layer in my life more than the model I work in.
Gemini is the AI I use the most without ever really thinking about it. I’m deep in the Google ecosystem. Google Home speakers all over my house, a new Pixel Pro XL every single year, Android Auto in the car. Gemini is just there, so I talk to it in the kitchen, I talk to it while I’m driving, and I fire off quick one-off questions on my phone all the time.
What changed is that it used to be where I went to research things. That’s Claude now. Gemini is not the model I do real work in, and the reason has almost nothing to do with how smart it is. It has no hooks into my AIOS, so every conversation starts from zero and I have to explain my entire situation before it can tell me anything useful. Context is the thing that makes an AI valuable to me, and Gemini does not have mine. It’s also just genuinely bad sometimes, in ways that surprise me for a company this size.
It stays on this list because I use it constantly, just not the way most people mean when they say they use an AI. It’s the assistant layer, not the work layer. If Google ever lets it reach into my own context the way I need, that changes fast.