Using a lot of AI tools comes with the territory when you write about them constantly. This also means assuming I already know what they do, which is not always a fair assumption going in, but it’s also not too far off; most of them do roughly the same thing in slightly different ways. When I first tested Claude, I approached it with the same mindset - that I give it a query and get an output, and call it a day. But I was barely scratching the surface of what it actually does, and only started noticing because I kept bumping into features that had no equivalent anywhere else.

So this is not necessarily about how Claude is better than ChatGPT, Gemini, or the others, because it depends entirely on what you’re using them for. It’s more that Claude has a handful of things baked in that many are overlooking, or that competitors’ AI tools don’t really have anything to match.

Keep in mind, I’m talking about the core chatbot interface for desktop and web (simply called Claude and Claude.ai, respectively) not Claude Code.

Claude can show you, not just tell you

Build anything right in the conversation

Claude already had Artifacts - the side panel where it builds and renders things like apps, screens, and small tools. It’s been around for a few years and is genuinely useful, but in March 2026, Anthropic rolled out something a bit different - interactive visuals that render inline, right between paragraphs of a response, instead of opening in a separate panel. Though you can request it, Claude can also decide when a visual would explain something better than text, build it on the spot, and it appears right in the chat. It’s built with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and leverages SVG for vector graphics - the same way websites are built, which is why you can interact with these visuals.

The distinction from Artifacts is worth understanding. Artifacts are persistent and shareable from the start - they’re the finished output. Inline visuals are more like a whiteboard sketch. They live in the moment, change as the conversation evolves, and disappear when you move on. You can still save them as an SVG or HTML file, or convert them to Artifacts if you want to keep them. But the point is that you don’t have to think about any of that upfront. And you can literally get anything from charts and dashboards to fully interactive tools. I even got it to create a basic but functioning calculator in one of my chats because I needed to run the same cost comparison with different numbers without breaking focus.

You get the visual when it’s useful, and that’s the productivity angle that’s easy to miss. Every time you’d normally open a separate tool, fire up a spreadsheet, or sketch something by hand, Claude can handle all of it in one place. So it’s not just about getting nice sketches and diagrams to accompany the responses to your queries; they’re part of the responses and can replace the need to break your flow or hop over to other tools.

Projects lets Claude remember everything, so you don’t have to

Upload your context once, and every conversation knows it

A lot of people (myself included at first) use Claude the same way they would a search engine - open a chat, explain the situation, get the output, and close the chat. Which works fine, until you’re doing the same type of work repeatedly and spending the first few minutes of every session re-explaining the vision or what you’re working on. Projects fixes that.

You create a project, drop in whatever context is relevant - a style guide, a brief, reference docs, notes, whatever - and every conversation you start inside that project already has all of it loaded in. You completely skip the background preamble and just start. Every chat you create within that project will have all the relevant context you added.

For anyone doing repetitive knowledge work, it can compound fast, but Projects makes it much easier to navigate. If you're a developer, you load in your codebase documentation and technical specs once. If you're a researcher, your sources and notes are always in context. If you're running a business, your brand guidelines and product details are just there. The work starts immediately instead of a setup ritual that adds up more than you think - just five minutes a day doing this prep manually is several hours a month. Paid users get unlimited Projects, and free users can create up to five, which is still a great value.

You can throw entire documents at it, and it won’t lose the thread

200k tokens as the baseline. Up to 1 million if you need it.

When it comes to LLMs, the context window is everything. It’s essentially how much it can hold in its working memory at once. Both free and paid Claude users get a 200k token baseline, which is roughly 500 pages of text in a session, which is already a lot (free users do get more rate limits with the 5-hour rolling window system). Paid plans running Opus 4.6 or Sonnet 4.6 push that up to 1 million tokens, which went live in March 2026 with no extra charge on top of your plan. The catch is that longer sessions actually burn through your usage quota faster - the more context Claude is holding, the heavier each message weighs against your limits, which is why I tend to keep the extended token usage disabled.

The productivity angle here is pretty straightforward. Most AI tools start losing the thread as a conversation gets longer, or force you to summarize and re-paste context manually. With 200K as your floor, you can drop in a full research PDF, a long draft, a transcript, a whole brief - and just work with it directly without babysitting what the model does and doesn't remember. You’re not managing context nearly as much with Claude as with other bots, which lets you focus on the work for longer and uninterrupted.

To demonstrate, I uploaded my 160-page 17MB driving license test documentation, and it easily pulled accurate content from the start, middle, and end of the document within seconds.

Claude goes deeper than prompt and output

None of this is about Claude being the only AI worth using - it isn't, and which tool wins depends entirely on the task. But these are the things I kept running into that nothing else in my stack was doing quite the same way. Interactive visuals that live in the conversation, context that carries across sessions, and a window big enough to just throw the whole document at. Used right, it removes a lot of the friction that makes AI-assisted work feel like more work.