Articles

MCP Tools, Resources and Prompts

Three server primitives, divided not by what they do but by who pulls the trigger: the model picks tools, the application supplies resources, the user invokes prompts. Choose by blast radius, not by data shape.

Gemini vs ChatGPT

On context, multimodality and tool use they've converged. What hasn't: Gemini Flash's promotional rate doubles on 1 January 2027, Gemini Pro charges double above 200k tokens, and GPT-5.6 Luna undercuts everything at $0.20 per million.

Claude Opus vs Sonnet vs Haiku

Opus 5 and Sonnet 5 have the same context window, output ceiling and thinking mode at 2.5x the price — so the tier choice isn't what you think. Plus the knowledge-cutoff gap nobody checks, and why Haiku 4.5 is not the small Claude 5.

How to Use AI to Run an Ecommerce Store

19.3% of US online sales came back in 2025. Using AI to sort return reasons into causes with different owners, extract structured product attributes without inventing values, and write a policy that reassures buyers while closing loopholes.

How to Use AI to Manage Your Money

Chatbots recommend the mathematically optimal debt plan, but research on real payoff data found closing small accounts predicts success better. Making the trade-off explicit, catching stale figures, and checking the arithmetic in five seconds.

How to Use AI for Creative Writing

A Science Advances study found AI-assisted stories were rated more creative — and were measurably more similar to each other. The division of labour that follows: use it for structure, continuity and diagnosis, and write the sentences yourself.

How to Use AI for Lesson Planning

Teachers using AI weekly report saving 5.9 hours a week. Where those hours really are — differentiation, rubrics, item generation — why you should start from objectives rather than activities, and what a model can never know about your class.

How to Use AI to Study

A PNAS field experiment found students given an unrestricted GPT-4 scored 17% worse than students who never had AI at all. The one instruction that reversed the effect, and why a study session that felt smooth is the warning sign.

How to Use AI to Prepare for a Fundraise

One rule governs everything: the model never touches your numbers. Within that, the highest-return use is adversarial — having it play a sceptical partner and find the question you can't answer while the cost of fumbling is still zero.

How to Use AI to Plan Your Week

Models are trained on aspirational plans, so they produce eleven hours of work in an eight-hour day. Give it real capacity, forbid compression, and make it tell you what doesn't fit. Plus the truth about the 23-minute interruption statistic.