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The most important shift in AI tool usage over the past year has been from conversational chat interfaces to agentic systems that can perform many hours of human work autonomously.

Ethan Mollick's guide has evolved from recommending chat-based AI models to emphasizing agentic systems that can do the equivalent of many hours of human work in one go. ✦ AI generated

Author · Simon Willison's Weblog · 2026-07-27 · original ↗

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It's interesting watching the evolution of Ethan Mollick's guide over time. A year ago it was still all about chat - ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini - with o3, Claude 4 Opus, and Gemini 2.5 Pro as the models and Deep Research as a useful alternative mode. Today it's much more about agentic systems - "where the AI is capable of doing the equivalent of many hours of real human work in one go".

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▦ Gemini ✳ ChatGPT ✳ Claude ◉ Ethan Mollick

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Evidence · 2

The most important evolution in AI over the past year is the shift from conversational chat to agentic systems that can autonomously perform hours of human work.Author · Simon Willison's Weblog · conf 95%AI models' ability to complete real, economically valuable freelance projects end-to-end more than quadrupled in under eight months, rising from 2.5% success in October 2025 to 16.1% in July 2026.CAIS and Scale researchers · Import AI · conf 90%

In practice · 1

Customer support voice agents are shifting from reactive (customers calling with a problem) to proactive, becoming the front-end of the entire shopping and discovery experience.Mati Staniszewski · No Priors · conf 80%

Context · 1

The best PLG companies today will also be best positioned for the agentic layer where tools are selected without a human in the loop.Matt Swulinski · 20VC · conf 80%

Extends · 1

The center of gravity in AI is shifting from prompts to harnesses: graph engineering is mostly old software architecture renamed, and most agents still do not need complex graphs unless workflows branch, verify, or require human approvals.AINews / Latent.Space · Latent Space · conf 65%

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provides context → Google's Gemini has fallen out of the recommended AI tools because the company still lacks a clear agentic computing product comparable to Codex, ChatGPT Work, or Cowork.Author · Simon Willison's Weblog provides context → The naming of AI agent modes across ChatGPT and Claude is confusing and inconsistent, with Work, Codex, Cowork, and Code not mapping cleanly between platforms.Ethan Mollick · Simon Willison's Weblog provides context → The difference between ChatGPT Work on mobile versus the desktop app is spectacularly unintuitive — mobile Work mode simply grants the Code Interpreter unrestricted internet access rather than providing agentic capabilities.Author · Simon Willison's Weblog