Three Ways I Use AI to Work
Web app, desktop app, terminal. One of them won.
My Medium friends can read this over on Medium.
I use the same AI models in three different places. A browser tab. A desktop app. A terminal window.
Same Claude underneath. Three completely different experiences.
And I keep ending up in the terminal. Every time.
The browser
The easy one. chatgpt.com, claude.ai. Open a tab, type, go.
Nothing to install. Works on any machine, your phone, a friend's laptop. For a quick question, a draft, a rewrite, it does the job. I still use it when I'm away from my Mac.
The limit is that it's a sealed room. It only knows what you paste in. Your files, your projects, your code sit on the other side of the glass.
So you become the copy-paste machine. Drop a file in, get an answer, paste it back, repeat. Fine for one thing. Tiring for real work.
The app
The desktop apps go a step further. Claude and ChatGPT both have one.
A keyboard shortcut pulls it up over whatever you're doing. It sits next to your work instead of in a far-off tab. Claude's app has Cowork, where it works beside you instead of just answering in a box. Connectors let it reach some of your apps and tools, so it sees context a browser tab never gets.
Better. Closer to what you're actually doing. But it still knocks at every door before it opens one, and there's a ceiling on what it can touch.
The terminal
Then there's Claude Code in the terminal. It lives in my terminal on my machine, and that changes the whole thing.
It works on my real files. Not uploads, the actual ones on my disk. And it reaches well past that:
Runs commands for me
Talks to git and pushes to GitHub
Connects to my FTP servers
Calls APIs
Chains into the other command-line tools I already use
One go in the terminal can replace twenty copy-pastes in a browser.
I came from web design, then moved into apps, and AI coding is what made that jump easy for me. The terminal is where that power actually lives.
The deeper a tool sits in your system, the more it can do for you. But there are more risks too, of course.
The catch
None of this is free of trade-offs.
The terminal scares people, and that's fair. A blinking cursor, no buttons, no nice interface to click around in. If you've never touched a command line, it's a wall at first.
The browser wins on pure access. Any device, nothing to set up, always there.
And the deeper the access, the more you want to watch what you hand over. It can change real files and run real commands. I keep half an eye on what it's doing. You should too.
But it's all doable. Start in the browser. Move to the app when you want it closer. The terminal will be there when you're ready, and it's a nice place to live once you're in. I went through my favorite terminal tools separately.
The Bottom Line
Same model. Three doors.
The browser is the easiest. The app is the comfortable middle. The terminal gives me the whole machine.
I keep walking through the last one. Not because it's trendy. Because nothing else gets out of my way like it does.