AI Reviews
Everyone reviews the frontier. Almost nobody carefully reviews the budget shelf, which is a shame, because that is where most real work should actually run. I spent time putting the cheap models through the same ordinary tasks I use every day. The winner was not the one I expected, and the losers were instructive.
Read more: The best cheap LLM in 2026 is probably not the one you think
Coding assistant comparisons usually happen on toy problems with clean answers, which is exactly why they are useless. So I did the opposite. I took one genuinely annoying real bug, the kind that spans a few files and does not announce itself, and pointed three assistants at it: Claude, GPT, and Microsoft new MAI coding model in Copilot. Here is how they actually did.
Read more: Claude, GPT, and MAI on the same real bug: a coding assistant face-off
Claude Fable 5 is the best model I have put on real work this year. It is also expensive enough to make you flinch, and it spent the second half of June switched off by a government order. All three of those things are true at once, which is the only honest way to review it.
Read more: Claude Fable 5 review: brilliant, expensive, and briefly illegal
Reviewing GPT-5.6 is a bit like reviewing a reliable mid-size sedan. There is not much drama here, and that is sort of the point. It does almost everything competently, nothing spectacularly, and it will not embarrass you. For a huge number of people, that is exactly the right model.
Read more: GPT-5.6 review: competent everywhere, exciting nowhere
There is a specific moment where Gemini 3.1 Pro stops being one option and becomes the obvious one: the moment you drop a 400-page document or a video into the chat and ask it to make sense of the whole thing. For that job, nothing in my rotation touches it.
Read more: Gemini 3.1 Pro review: still the one to beat on long documents