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Comment by mrtksn | Hacker News Reader

Some time ago I canceled all my paid subscriptions to chatbots because they are interchangeable so I just rotate between Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini, Deepseek and Mistral.

On the API side of things my experience is that the model behaving as expected is the greatest feature.

There I also switched to Openrouter instead of paying directly so I can use whatever model fits best.

The recent buzz about ad-based chatbot services is probably because the companies no longer have an edge despite what the benchmarks say, users are noticing it and cancel paid plans. Just today OpenAI offered me 1 month free trial as if I wasn’t using it two months ago. I guess they hope I forget to cancel.

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Yep I spent 3 days optimizing my prompt trying to get gpt-5 to work. Tried a bunch of different models (some Azure some OpenRouter) and got a better success rate with several others without any tailoring of the prompt.

Was really plug and play. There are still small nuances to each one, but compared to a year ago prompts are much more portable

What tools or process do you use to optimize your prompts?

usually either use Grok to optimize a mistral prompt, or you can use gemini to optimize a chatGPT prompt. It's best to keep those pairs of AIs and not cross streams!

> I guess they hope I forget to cancel.

Business model of most subscription based services.

For me it's just that I am too lazy to start switching from my GPT subscription, I use it with codex and it's very good for my use-case. And the price at least here in Asia is not expensive at all for the plus tier. The amount of tokens are so much that I usually cannot even spend the weekly quota, although I use context smartly and know my codebase so I can always point it to right place right away.

I feel like at least for normies if they are familiar with ChatGPT, it might be hard to make them switch especially if they are subscribed.

I estimate at 10% of meetup runs like that

> because they are interchangeable

What is your use-case?

Mine is: I use "Pro"/"Max"/"DeepThink" models to iterate on novel cross-domain applications of existing mathematics.

My interaction is: I craft a detailed prompt in my editor, hand it off, come back 20-30 minutes later, review the reply, and then repeat if necessary.

My experience is that they're all very, very different from one another.

my use case is Google replacement, things that I can do by myself so I can verify and things that are not important so I don’t have to verify.

Sure, they produce different output so sometimes I will run the same thing on a few different models when Im not sure or happy but I’d don’t delegate the thinking part actually, I always give a direction in my prompts. I don’t see myself running 30min queries because I will never trust the output and will have to do all the work myself. Instead I like to go step by step together.

Maybe give Perplexity a shot? It has Grok, ChatGPT, Gemini, Kimi K2, I dont think it has Mistral unfortunately.

I like perplexity actually but haven’t been using it since some time. Maybe I should give it a go :)

I use their browser called Comet for finance related research. Very nice. I use pretty much all of the main ai's, chat, deep, gem, claude - all i have found little niche use case that i'm sure will rotate at some point in an upgrade cycle. there are so many ai's i don't see the point in paying for one. I'm convinced they will need ads to survive.

excited to add mistral to the rotation!

Oh man I use Comet nearly daily, I tried setting perplexity as my new tab page on other browsers and for some reason its not the same. I mostly use it that boring way too.

Kagi has Mistral as well

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