Which tool for which job

The default is wrong more often than it is right

Opening a chatbot has become the reflex for every question, the way opening a search box was ten years ago. For a fair share of schoolwork it is the wrong instrument, and the wrongness is predictable from the mechanism in the first lesson.

Use this as a first pass.

Exact arithmetic or algebra. Not a chatbot on its own. A calculator, a spreadsheet, or a computer algebra system. Free and good: SymPy (Python, free), Maxima (free, decades old, powerful), GeoGebra (free, browser, excellent for graphing and geometry), Desmos (free graphing). Job ads and universities mention MATLAB and Mathematica; GNU Octave runs most MATLAB code free, and SageMath covers much of Mathematica’s ground. If your chat tool has a code interpreter, that counts too, because it writes Python and actually runs it rather than predicting the answer.

Finding out whether something exists. Not a chatbot. A search engine or a database. Google Scholar, PubMed, arXiv, your library catalogue. A chatbot answers what would a source about this look like. A database answers does this source exist.

Current facts. Search, or a chatbot with search switched on and the links opened. Prices, timetables, exam dates, current office-holders, this year’s syllabus.

Statistics on your own data. A spreadsheet (LibreOffice Calc, free; Google Sheets, free), or jamovi or JASP: both free, both give you SPSS-style output without SPSS’s licence, both are what a lot of psychology departments now actually use. Ask the model which test and why; run the test in the tool.

Reading a scanned handout. OCR. Free options: Google Lens on a phone, Tesseract on a desktop. Many chat tools now read images directly, which is fine for short text and unreliable for tables and handwriting.

Writing and rewriting prose, explaining a concept, generating practice questions, translating, summarising text you supply, arguing with you. This is the chatbot’s home ground. It is very good at all of it.

Storing anything. Not the chat. A document, a folder, a repository.

The free stack, named

Courses and job ads name paid tools because workplaces buy them. Learn the concept on the free one and the paid one takes an afternoon.

• Documents: Microsoft Word → LibreOffice Writer, Google Docs
• Spreadsheets: Excel → LibreOffice Calc, Google Sheets
• Statistics: SPSS, Stata → jamovi, JASP, R with RStudio
• Maths: Mathematica, MATLAB → SageMath, GNU Octave, SymPy
• References: EndNote → Zotero (free, and better)
• Diagrams: Visio → draw.io, Inkscape
• Images for coursework: Photoshop → Photopea (runs in a browser, free), GIMP, Krita
• Video for a presentation: Premiere → DaVinci Resolve (free tier is full-featured), Shotcut, Kdenlive
• Audio: → Audacity
• Notes: → Obsidian, Joplin, plain markdown files
• Programming: → Python, VS Code or VSCodium, Google Colab (free GPU hours)

Every one of these runs on a modest laptop; several run on a phone browser.

Combining them is where the value is

The strong pattern is not one tool, it is a handoff. Ask the model which statistical test suits this design and why, then run it in jamovi. Ask it give me the SymPy code to check this integral, then run the code. Ask it what would I search to find whether this claim has been tested, then search Scholar. In each case the model does the part it is good at (knowing the shape of the field, phrasing the query, explaining the choice) and something deterministic does the part where being wrong is expensive.

The one-sentence test

Before opening a chat window, ask: what would it cost me if this answer were confidently wrong? If the answer is a wasted five minutes, use the chatbot and move on. If the answer is a wrong number in a lab report, a fabricated source in a bibliography, or a program that runs and produces rubbish, use the deterministic tool and let the model advise you about which one.

This single question sorts most of schoolwork correctly, and it does not require you to remember any list.

When you have only a phone

A great deal of this works on a phone browser: GeoGebra, Desmos, Photopea, Google Sheets, Colab, Zotero’s web library, Scholar. What does not work well on a phone is anything requiring a large screen for comparison: reading a paper alongside your notes, or checking code output against a spec. If a phone is your only machine, use your institution’s computer room for those tasks specifically, and do everything else where you are.