Looking for an “AI” that would tackle my day-to-day issues that are not related to programming, for example acting as a personal assistant / life coach, creating lesson plans for classes I teach at school, explaining how things work and teaching me new skills effectively, etc.
I need it to be able to consider web search options for more comprehensive answers.
Doesn’t have to be free, as I’d be happy to pay if it’s truly worth it.
So far I’ve tried:
- Most common options at Poe, including Claude Sonnet 3.5, GPT4o and others. The issue here is that I’m not seeing which one is actually smarter and which one hallucinates more.
- Perplexity
- Phind
- Gemini
- Bing AI
I have never had a GPT4 subscription so I might consider that if it’s objectively the best option.
What can you recommend? 🙂
For programming it is Sonnet 3.5, there is no remotely close 2nd place that I have tried or heard of, and I am always looking. I personally don’t really have any interest in measuring them in other ways. But for coding, Sonnet 3.5 is in a distant lead. Abacus.ai is a nice way to try various models for cheap. Really, some sort of agent setup like mixture of agents that uses Claude and got and maybe some others may do better than Claude alone. Matthew Berman shows Mixture of Agents with local models beating gpt4o, so doing it with sonnet3.5 and others of the best closed models would probably be pretty great.
What language are you programming in? In swift I have found all models (including sonnet) next to useless. Tells me something wrong almost every question i ask, has made up macros and apis, etc.
For English I have found Claude models slightly better than the GPT 4 subscription I used to have. For anything in multiple (human, not programming) languages, gpt has seemed best for me.
I was mainly doing python with gpt4, but now im working on an android project, so kotlin. Gpt4 wasn’t much use for kotlin, especially for questions involving more than a couple files. Sonnet is crushing it though, even when I give it 2k+ LoC. I’d say I’ve done about 2 months of pre-llm work in the last week, granted I am no professional, just a hobbyist.
I’m learning Kotlin and Android Studio and for that I’m developing a very simple CRUD App. I used sonet 3.5 and was impressed when it developed the XML file, mainactivity, added internet access permits and wrote the restful API in PHP for XAMPP. It compiled at the first try, but for the life of me I can’t find why the restful API keeps returning a 405 error. And I’m a seasoned programmer in C, C++, phyton and XAMPP! It was, at the same time, impressive and extremely frustrating.
I don’t know about your specific issue, but I have found that it helps quite a bit to often start new conversations. Also, I have a couple of paragraphs explaining the whole idea of my project that I always paste in at the beginning of each conversation. I’ve not been doing anything terribly complicated or cutting-edge, but I haven’t come across anything yet that Sonnet hasn’t been able to figure out, although sometimes it does take me being very clear and wordy about what I’m doing and starting from a fresh slate. I’ve also found it helps a lot if I specifically tell it to debug with lots of logs. Then I just go back and forth, giving it the outputs and changing code for it.