I pay for Cursor, OpenAI, and Anthropic. I was paying for Google Gemini as well, but it was returning too many errors so I canceled it. I also pay for Google office, Microsoft office, and Adobe subscriptions. They inject their own AI into their services, but I end up ignoring them or turning them off.

Mostly use it for coding in Cursor, but occasionally for research into the state of AI and to make MCP extensions. It’s been worth the investment so far, given how much more of the mundane coding tasks get done by supervising it. I also had it update a Wordpress theme because I had no interest in learning the innards.

I never let them loose in ‘agentic’ mode, as they inevitably destroy all the work. I can run decent-sized models locally through lmstudio and Cline, but they’re much slower than just using Cursor and a cloud model.

Outside coding, the only usable one I’ve found is Adobe Firefly, accessed inside Photoshop (to remove material) and Illustrator (to generate simple SVGs and icons from prompts).

Every single other one, when I’ve put it to a non-coding use has been a pile of slop. If all LLMs go away tomorrow, the only one I’ll miss is the Adobe SVG creator.