The Commoner's
Guide to AI

The chatbot from OpenAI that made the whole world suddenly care about AI in late 2022. It writes, explains, summarises and argues back.

The one your uncle means when he says "the AI." Most people's first and last stop.

Anthropic's assistant, known for long-form writing, reasoning and coding — and for trying hard not to make things up.

The studious one. Full disclosure: it's the one that wrote this very website.

Google's assistant, woven into Search, Gmail and Docs — so it turns up whether or not you went looking for it.

Handy if you already live inside Google. Ambient rather than chosen.

A Chinese lab's model that startled everyone by matching far pricier rivals at a fraction of the cost — and publishing its weights so anyone can run it.

Strong at maths and code. The one people reach for when the bill from somewhere else starts to sting.

Moonshot AI's assistant, built around an unusually long context window — it can hold whole books and long document piles in mind at once.

For when you want to hand over everything at once rather than feeding it in slices.

Where the world's software is stored, versioned and shared. Not AI itself — but nearly every AI tool is built and kept here.

Google Drive for code, with a long memory and strong opinions about who changed what.

A programming editor with an AI pair-programmer built in — it writes, edits and explains code alongside you.

Notepad, if Notepad could code for you and argue about the semicolons.

You describe the app or site you want in plain English and it writes the whole thing, with a live preview you can keep correcting.

The purest form of vibe coding. No files, no setup, just conversation until it looks right.

Same idea as Lovable — type what you want, watch an app appear in the browser, then refine it by asking for changes.

Good for getting something real on screen within the hour. Worth trying both and keeping whichever you argue with less.

A complete workshop that lives in a browser tab — write, run and publish software without installing anything on your machine.

Useful when you don't want your laptop to become a building site.

Takes the website you've built and makes it live on the internet at a real address, updating every time you change something.

The staircase from "it works on my laptop" to "anyone can visit it."

The same job as Vercel — hosting your site and publishing updates automatically. Long-standing and dependable.

Pick one and stop reading comparison articles; for a first site they are close enough.

The back room of an app: the database, the logins, the uploaded files. The part users never see and cannot do without.

The moment your app needs to remember anything — accounts, orders, saved work — this is what it remembers into.

A database wearing a spreadsheet's clothes. Looks like Excel, behaves like something an app can be built on top of.

The friendliest way to keep structured records without learning what a database is.

Connects apps that don't otherwise talk. "When this happens over here, do that over there" — no code involved.

New form entry becomes a spreadsheet row becomes a Slack message. You set it up once and then glide.

The same idea as Zapier, but drawn as a visual map — you can see every branch and condition laid out on a canvas.

Better when the job has many moving parts and you want to watch them move.

Automation like Zapier and Make, with one difference: you can run it on your own machine or server instead of renting it.

The choice when the work is heavy, the data is sensitive, or the monthly bills have started to sting.

Documents, notes and simple databases in one place, with AI built in to draft and summarise what's already there.

Where the plan lives before it becomes a product — and where it quietly rots if you stop tending it.

A text-to-image generator: describe a picture in words and it paints one for you in seconds.

A tireless painter who works for pennies, never sleeps, and occasionally gives people extra fingers.

Generates short video clips from a description, with unusually direct control over how the camera itself moves — push in, orbit, crane, whip pan.

For people who think in shots rather than pictures. The camera move is the product.

ByteDance's video generator — text or a still image in, moving footage out, with a reputation for smooth, coherent motion.

Feed it one photograph and let it move. Good for bringing a still product shot to life.

The long-running one: generates video, but also edits it — removing objects, replacing backgrounds, extending shots.

Closer to a whole edit suite than a single trick. Where film people tend to land.

Google's filmmaking tool, built on its Veo video model — you assemble scenes shot by shot rather than generating one clip at a time.

For stringing shots into something that holds together, instead of a pile of pretty fragments.

Turns written text into speech that doesn't sound like a satnav — and can dub a finished video into other languages.

Narration for videos you'd rather not record yourself. Clone your own voice only if you're prepared for how strange that feels.

A giant open marketplace where you can download thousands of free AI models and datasets and run them yourself.

GitHub, but for AI brains. Yes, the logo really is a hugging emoji. No, nobody will explain why.