The 3 stages of AI usage, where do you actually sit?

I've been building in the AI space for a while now, and I keep seeing the same pattern: most people are using AI the same way they used the early internet. They read, they search, they ask questions. But they're not really building or automating yet.

And that's not a criticism. The internet took years to go from "browse pages" to "infrastructure that runs everything." AI is moving 10xfaster, but the adoption pattern is the same.

Here's what I'm seeing across the community:

1. Stage one is where most people are right now. They open ChatGPT or Claude, ask a question, copy the answer, close the tab. It's useful, but it's manual.

2. Stage two is where things get interesting. People are running agents that actually do things. They write code, research topics, process files. But they're still switching between tools, copy-pasting context, managing each agent separately.

3. Stage three is what I think is actually next, and almost nobody's talking about it yet. One place where your tools, agents, and workflows connect and run together. No stitching between tabs. No manual context switching. The orchestration layer.

The agent hype cycle peaked last year. Now everyone has them. But agents in isolation are just the new chatbots, useful on their own but limited. The real unlock is connecting them.

That's the gap we identified, and that's what we built Extella to solve. A personal orchestration platform that lives on your device. One chat interface, multiple agents working together, connected to your tools, your files, your actual workflows. It adapts to how you work instead of forcing you into a new system.
Learn more about ExtellaAI: https://www.producthunt.com/products/extella-ai

If you're still at stage one (chatbot only), is that intentional? Like, you just need text generation and don't need agents yet? Or is it because the automation part seems too complicated to set up?

And if you're already automating, how many separate AI tools are you juggling right now? What's your actual stack?