Which tools do you use, and have they actually made you more productive? Please share all the tools you use for different tasks, with pros and cons if you don't mind. Also, I would be curious to hear how much you pay monthly for these products.
Yes, also personal life.
I pay for chatGPT mostly for deep research queries.
For those who don't know, "deep research" is basically getting the AI to do web searches for you, read the resultant pages and continue following the breadcrumbs to find the info you're after, if it even exists.
Deep research saves me literally hours of time per query if i am looking on the internet for a solution to a problem or info in general.
Rather than me spend 5 hours of dead time googling and reading links off search engines, reddit, etc. i can get AI to do it for me and generate a report of its findings - and do something more productive with my life for the 10-15 minutes the query takes to go down all sorts of dead ends and additional searches, never mind the hours i get back doing it myself.
Deep research is IMHO truly one of the great uses of current LLMs - they know how to read and generally understand text, this is literally getting them to read a bunch of stuff for you MUCH faster than you can do it yourself.
Combining chatgpt with web search is also great for things like finding products, comparing products, etc.
Disclaimer: i haven't tried paid Google AI or any other paid service. I hear OpenAI is behind in some areas, and google has their own deep research. But for me, for what... $20 australian per month, paid ChatGPT is 100% worth it, as it saves me hundreds of dollars worth of my time every time i use it.
Even basic stuff like this, when monitor shopping (real world example of something i did the other day as a friend is considering how to use their ipad pro with something equivalent to their desktop dual 27" 1440p monitor setup - while the ipad pro only supports on external display):
Shared via ChatGPT
chatgpt.com