Ditching ChatGPT: How I'm Rebuilding My Workflow Around Google Workspace, Gemini, and the Terminal

I've been quiet for a minute. Not because nothing was happening the opposite. I've been heads-down rebuilding how I actually work as a developer, and it's been one of those shifts that's hard to talk about until you've actually lived with it for a while.

Here's what changed, why, and what I'm still figuring out.

---

Unsubscribing from ChatGPT

I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription. Not because it stopped being useful it didn't but because I realised I was paying for something I was already getting elsewhere. I've been on Google Workspace for a while now, and I was barely scratching the surface of what it actually includes.

The honest version: I was defaulting to ChatGPT out of habit, not because it was the best tool for the job.

---

What Google Workspace Actually Gives You

When I actually sat down and mapped out what I'm paying for with Workspace, the list was longer than I expected:

• Gemini AI assistant baked into Docs, Gmail, and available as a standalone tool. It's not a ChatGPT replacement in every case, but for the work I'm doing day-to-day, it gets the job done.
• Notebook LM This one surprised me. It's not a chatbot; it's a research and synthesis tool. You feed it your documents, your notes, your sources, and it helps you think through them. I've been using it to help structure and draft long-form content (including some of the posts on this blog).
• Google Drive More storage than I was using, and it actually integrates cleanly with the rest of the suite.
• Google Meet and Calendar I'm not fully leaning on these yet, but they're next. Eventually I want to surface my streaming schedule on the website via Google Calendar.

The shift isn't "Google is better than OpenAI." It's "I'm already paying for this, so I'm going to actually use it."

---

Getting Comfortable in the Terminal

The other big change this past stretch has been forcing myself to work more in the terminal. I've always been more of a GUI person VS Code, clicks, menus. It worked, but I knew I was leaving efficiency on the table.

So I started building out a proper terminal setup. Nothing exotic learning to navigate faster, getting comfortable with the tools I was already using but interacting with through UIs. It slows you down at first, which is the most annoying part. You know exactly how to do the thing the slow way, and now you're choosing to do it the slower-but-eventually-faster way.

A few things that helped:

• Just using it. Not having a plan, just opening the terminal first instead of the GUI.
• Building small scripts for repetitive tasks instead of doing them manually (more on this in a future post; my streaming workflow has some good examples).
• Getting comfortable with reading errors instead of immediately Googling them.

I'm not a terminal wizard. I'm still learning. But I'm noticeably faster than I was two months ago, and that gap keeps widening.

---

What's Next

The terminal work is just going to keep compounding. That's the nature of it.

If you're a developer who's been meaning to cut some subscriptions or actually explore what you're already paying for in a tool suite, it's worth doing the audit. You might already have what you're paying extra for elsewhere.