ZD 25.50: Precision Guided AI
What are vendor platform tools? How can they make your prompts precise?
Chatbots for Show, Platform Tools for Dough
The chatbots we have today, tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and their competitors, are amazing. More often than not, they understand your imprecise instructions and come back with useful output. Most of them even help package your work through features like Custom GPTs, projects, and spaces. That convenience comes at a cost: abstraction hides how things actually work. Control can be imprecise.
Sometimes you need more finite controls or a deeper understanding. One way to get there is to write code, but most AI vendors also offer studio tools that let you work directly with the API. These tools pull back the curtain: you can see how prompts are constructed, compare variations, and more easily build applications, automations, or even lightweight publishing workflows.
What Platform Tools Can Do
Platform tools such as Google AI Studio, OpenAI’s Dashboard, Claude Console, and Perplexity Playground let you interact more directly with AI models than a standard chatbot. They provide structured tooling for developing, testing, visualizing, and deploying AI workflows.
These “Platform Tools” sit between pure end‑user applications like ChatGPT and working with the API directly in code, offering more control without requiring full‑scale development.
They are not free, but usage-based pricing is often cheaper and more flexible than paying for subscriptions that sit idle. They usually aren’t expensive, but costs can add up if you are pushing a lot of content or generating a lot of media via the API.
The magic of platform tools is that they remove a layer of indirection, giving you direct control over how the model behaves. They expose many of the knobs and switches behind the scenes of your favorite chatbot. Because you can be explicit about options, you can get much more consistent results. The tools also map to other behind-the-scenes AI tools.
Platform tools make you a better magician.
Google AI Studio is What Gemini Should Be
Gemini is great, but the consumer-facing tool is fairly limited, which is why AI Studio is such a step up. There isn’t a desktop app, and the web application has few bells and whistles. Nano Banana is hard to configure — getting aspect ratios right is hit or miss, you always have a little Gemini watermark to contend with. Google’s AI Studio is what Gemini should be. It is feature-rich, with lots of options and ways to manage your AI conversations and projects.
The name fits: there is a lot packed into the tool. Some features it includes are:
The Playground is the central feature. It lets you prompt most of Google’s models, lets you leverage System Instructions for most of them. These can be saved and reused, dramatically speeding up development.
Using the Playground, you can harness the astounding image generation powers of Nano Banana much more effectively. Beyond System Instructions, you can control output settings like aspect ratio and specify quality from 1k to 4k. Images do not have the Gemini watermark like they do with the normal tool.
You can generate two-person voice conversations in a variety of voices using scripts you supply.
There is a Veo 3.1 app for creating video from text, frames or with an example image.
You can build small, interactive applications that run within the tool. These apps can be published to a gallery or to Google Cloud. You can also browse the gallery and run other creator’s apps.
The tool has a lot of nooks and crannies, but its depth is its strength. It is the way to get the most out of the Google toolchain and a markedly better prompting environment than Gemini.
Finally, if video is more of your thing, see Futurepedia’s walkthrough on YouTube. Also note that Google has a few competing AI studio products.
OpenAI’s Omniscient Dashboard
OpenAI’s dashboard, compared to Google’s Studio, is more developer-focused. A primary use case is a place where advanced end users can build prompts that can be versioned, saved, and called in other applications, bridging the gap from the front lines to development. Like everything else, OpenAI does a good job of making a functional yet deep user interface.
Here are some things you can do with the tool:
Side-by-side prompt testing is very well implemented. You can tweak just about any conceivable knob in a repeatable manner. Your chats can include calls to storage, MCP or tools.
The new and exciting Agent Builder tool lives here; you can build workflows in ChatGPT that can be embedded in other apps via the ChatKit SDK.
OpenAI’s lead in audio shows — you can test conversational tools with real-time audio. You can have a conversation with any prompt you choose to share. A text-to-speech tool is also included for the occasions you need to generate audio.
You can create media, though this looks to be little different than the Sora app from what I can see. Unlike Google, audio is not included so the text-to-speech might become handy for the right clip. Note that you must verify your account to create media, OpenAI is strict about API access here.
OpenAI includes a vector store interface that makes it easy to store documents for your chats to work with. If you have a static set of knowledge, this tool is for you.
Claude’s Console & Perplexity Playground
Compared to Google and OpenAI, Claude and Perplexity do not offer full, end-to-end platform suites. They still offer important features for developers and advanced users.
Claude is most famous for Claude Code, but for advanced users they also make Claude Console. The killer feature of this tool is the prompt rewriter — it can step in and help make your prompt a lot better before it executes.
Perplexity features the Playground, where you can execute a Perplexity query with fine-grained options. It is primarily an API test tool, but it is a good one, and I have found it useful from time to time.
The World Behind the Curtain
Sometimes you need to see behind the curtain. Sometimes you need more consistent control. With these API-adjacent tools, you can do just that on all of these platforms. Many other vendors have similar features — do not be afraid to rummage around the settings screens and developer portals to see what options you do have on a given platform. You never know what superpower you will discover.
The Distilled Spirit
Warning Signs
🧓 Boomer Caregiving Will Break Us (Jeff Giesea)
The oldest baby boomers are turning 80. Senior citizens will outnumber children in America by 2034. The caregiving tsunami is here.
🏭 The Manufactured Rise of Nick Fuentes (Reality’s Last Stand)
According to a recent study, right wing influencer Nick Fuentes’ message is amplified by an array of foreign-controlled fake speech bots, not actual fans.
💪 The Era of Brotein (HE COOKS®)
What does all the protein do to a man?
2026 Predictions
🔮13 Predictions for 2026 (Rex Woodbury)
The Digital Native sees Anthropic having an IPO, you Insta feed will be 25% synthetic and more in part 1 of his 2026 predictions.
💡 26 Ideas for 2026 (Derek Thompson)
Derek Thompson sees an America on drugs going through an AI backlash while toiling in a casino economy.
🛍️ Consumer Trends for 2026 (The New Consumer (on Substack))
Gen Z and Millennials are entering their prime spending age and they are different consumers than the previous cohorts. A fascinating look into the mind of the American consumer in 122 chart-heavy slides.
AI Trends
🤖 Embodied AI Hits Stride in 2025 (Air Street Press)
Embodied AI, such as Robots, really took off on 2025. World Models, VLAMs and Chain of Action are making real world deployment more of a question of “when” and “how many” than “if?”
📉 That’s No Enron (Where’s Your Ed At?)
NVIDIA is not like Enron, but does that mean NVIDIA is not a scam? An exploration of the bear case for AI investment.
🎈 The AI bubble is not Popping Yet (2nd Order Thinkers)
The market thinks Wall Street’s NVIDIA estimates are way overvalued. As long as the hyperscalers keep needing to scale it will not fall. There might be better places to look for returns.
How To AI
✍️ Writing Faster With AI (AI Made Simple)
Using AI like a team makes you a better writer. Here is how one author does it.
5️⃣ ChatGPT Leadership Therapy (The Best Leadership Newsletter Ever)
Leadership is lonely. ChatGPT can be very cathartic.
🔁 Recursive Prompting (AI blew my mind)
A five step process to iterate over questions and get the right advice for questions. Really quantifies a lot of things I have been doing in an explainable package.
🔍 Understanding Perplexity (Leadership in Change)
Perplexity has lots of knobs. Here is how you can use them effectively.
🔨 Useful Patterns for Building HTML Tools (Simon Willison)
HTML tools are single file applications you can easily make with LLMs. Here are tips on building them from one of the best.
📊 Guide to Data Visualizations (Scientific Discovery)
One great use of said HTML tools: data visualization.
Fun Stuff
📅 52 Things I Learned in 2025 (Tom Whitell)
Tom’s annual list is back and not to be missed.
🧑🎄 ACL’s Holiday Gift Guide (A Continuous Lean)
This one is so good it does not matter it is so late.
🔪 The Life Changing Magic of Opting Out (No F*cks Given® with Sarah Knight)
Ho ho ho, just RSVP no . . . .
🧸 A History of the World in Japanese Toys (Matt Alt's Pure Invention)
You can tell a lot from toys.
🏀 Maryland’s Basketball Era (Rmag)
Let’s go Maryland!
The Look
Michael Spencer and Daria Cupareanu do an amazing job covering How to AI for Non-Technical Late Bloomers for AI beginners.
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