Interchangeable Choices

From airlines to AI, does the decision really matter?

I might as well flip a coin.

American or United to New York. Home Depot or Menards for duct tape. Substack or WordPress. Different decisions, same result. It often feels interchangeable.

Now I’m facing another choice, and I’m not at all sure it will turn out any differently.

I’ve been using ChatGPT for over three years. It’s helped with my writing, my consulting work, and even the occasional village issue. It’s fast, agreeable, and, if I’m being honest, rarely tells me I’m wrong.

But after a bike ride the other day, our daughter Laury said I should try something else: Claude.

Laury likes the way Claude helps her pull spreadsheets together and turn them into clean, usable reports. I can see the appeal. When I was running laboratories, that kind of help would have saved hours. Sometimes days. It often felt like it took a week just to assemble a monthly report from all the different sources.

But that’s not my life anymore. Even the consulting I do now is lighter, less data-driven. I’m not merging spreadsheets or tracking trends across thousands of cases. I’m writing. Thinking. Revising.

So the question, for me, is simpler. Which one helps me do that better?

I know what ChatGPT gives me. The tone, the speed, the steady encouragement.

Now I’ll see what Claude does.

Maybe this turns out to be another one of those interchangeable choices. Door #1 or Door #2.

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