HeyGen, Claude, ChatGPT, and Cursor: How I Actually Use Four Different AIs

I use four AI tools regularly. They do four different jobs. The discipline that took me a year to build is knowing which one to open before I open it.

ChatGPT. The fast generalist.

For: speed, breadth, first drafts, rough synthesis.

I open ChatGPT when I need to move quickly across unfamiliar terrain. Outline a deck. Stress-test a headline. Summarize a long thread. Explore three directions before committing to one. It is the daily driver for volume and optionality.

What it is not: my deepest thinking partner on nuanced brand work or political org dynamics. For that I go to Claude.

A recent moment: I fed it a forty-message internal thread on a campaign brief and asked it to surface the one objection three people had repeated in different language. It pulled the objection, the source of the original concern, and the framing most likely to move it. Twenty minutes I would have spent re-reading.

Claude. Depth, structure, long-form rigor.

For: reasoning, rewriting, careful analysis, sustained project work.

Claude is where I go when the work needs to hold together across many pages. Messaging architecture, narrative rewrites, policy-sensitive language, working through a complex doc set without losing the thread.

It rewards patience and specificity. Output quality jumps when I treat it like a senior collaborator and not a slot machine.

A recent moment: I gave it a brand positioning doc I had been polishing for weeks and asked it to find the contradiction I was sensing but could not name. It flagged that section three implied a market posture section seven walked back. I had been writing around the gap without seeing it.

Cursor. Building and vibe coding.

For: ship software, refactor, debug, learn in public by doing.

Cursor is not a writing tool. It is a build surface.

This is where GoYou moved from slides to screens. Where I learned what I actually meant by "simple onboarding" because I had to click through it myself. Where the stack stopped being vocabulary and became muscle memory.

If ChatGPT helps me think and Claude helps me refine, Cursor lets me exist in the artifact.

On a vacation in Cabo I asked Cursor about adding live streaming to GoYou. Twenty minutes later I had a working prototype on the patio. The feature was not what surprised me. What I let myself attempt was. Cursor changed the menu of what I will try.

HeyGen. Visual storytelling at speed.

For: video drafts, explainers, avatar-led walkthroughs when face-to-camera time is scarce.

HeyGen earns its place when the deliverable is motion plus narrative. Internal updates, concept videos, testing how a message lands when spoken instead of just written. I use it to lower the cost of seeing the story out loud.

A recent example: I used it to record a five-minute walk-through of a campaign concept I wanted my team to react to before we built the deck. Watching the message spoken back caught a tonal issue that read fine on the page. The strategy was the same. The framing changed because I heard it.

How the stack evolved

| Phase | Dominant tool | What changed | |---|---|---| | Early experimentation | ChatGPT | AI as faster Google + draft machine | | Strategy & language | Claude | AI as thinking partner | | Builder mode | Cursor | AI as implementation loop | | Visual narrative | HeyGen | AI as production assist |

The evolution was not "better models." It was clearer jobs.

The rule I keep

If I cannot name the job, I do not open the tool.

That single habit saved me from the worst version of AI work: busy, shiny, and strategically empty.