[HN Gopher] Switch to Claude without starting over
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Switch to Claude without starting over
        
       Author : doener
       Score  : 508 points
       Date   : 2026-03-01 07:36 UTC (15 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (claude.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (claude.com)
        
       | wps wrote:
       | Could someone explain the appeal of account-wide memory to me?
       | Anthropic's marketing indicates that nothing bleeds over, but I'm
       | just so protective of my context that I cannot imagine having
       | even a majorly distilled version of my other chats and
       | preferences having on weight on the output. As for certain
       | preferences like code styling or response length, these are all
       | fit for custom instructions, with more detailed things in Skills.
       | Ultimately like many things in LLM web UX, it seems to cater to
       | how the masses use these tools.
        
         | CGamesPlay wrote:
         | Sure, it's for those customers who don't have any idea what a
         | "context window" is.
        
           | wps wrote:
           | This seems to imply that customers assume by default that the
           | LLM remembers their past chats? I feel like the UI makes it
           | incredibly obvious it's a clean slate every time? But then
           | again people ask ridiculous meta questions all the time to
           | these chatbots expecting a correct answer.
        
             | CGamesPlay wrote:
             | Yeah, but then they went and added "memories" and in
             | particular automatic memory management, and now it isn't a
             | clean slate each time. And that's exactly what this is
             | importing: those automatically curated memories that make
             | the chat bot "feel like" it knows you.
        
         | gbalduzzi wrote:
         | > it seems to cater to how the masses use these tools.
         | 
         | Are you suggesting that they should ignore the needs of the
         | vast majority of their users?
         | 
         | I mean, of course they do, it would be worse otherwise
        
           | wps wrote:
           | Well, the masses are wrong. See: insane amounts of compute
           | wasted on "thank you", "haha true", "redo it", etc. I think
           | the UI should be designed to avoid misuse, and I think an
           | ever growing distillation of your most common traits is not a
           | good use of context length. If you want it, specify it. Maybe
           | even hard limits on chat length, why are we 20 replies deep
           | in a single chat? A user friendly option could be a single
           | button that distills that chat down, and opens a new one with
           | prebuilt instructions to continue the conversation. I'm no
           | product designer though, just some thoughts.
        
         | jjmarr wrote:
         | Most normal people want the LLM to remember their interests and
         | favourite things, so they don't have to manually re-explain
         | when asking for advice.
         | 
         | They also don't know what "context" is or that the LLM has a
         | limited number of tokens it can understand at any given time.
         | They just believe it knows everything at once.
        
           | deaux wrote:
           | Do you have example prompts where this would be usual? Why
           | would you want an LLM to know your favorite type of cheese?
           | Now that I say that, I guess if you use it for recipes then
           | it's useful if it remembers things like dietary restrictions.
           | And even then a project seems like the better option.
           | 
           | I can't think of much else though so I'm still curious what
           | you or others use it for.
        
             | tikotus wrote:
             | I had the same question a few days ago here:
             | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47162828
             | 
             | I didn't receive an answer besides "that's what people
             | like", but I still can't think of (m)any situations where
             | anyone would prefer it.
        
               | deaux wrote:
               | The reply about knowledge about their job and familt made
               | me think.
               | 
               | The only thing I can now think of is using it as a
               | personal therapist. Or asking how to approach their kids.
               | And they're a bit embarrassed about it, because it's
               | still outside the Overton window -especially on HN -
               | which is why they aren't sharing it.
               | 
               | If someone has different usecases, please do prove me
               | wrong! Maybe I just lack imagination.
        
               | randrus wrote:
               | I ask gpt a lot of questions about plants and gardening -
               | I'm happy that it remembers where I live and understands
               | the implications. I _could_ remind it in every question,
               | but this is convenient.
        
               | 0_____0 wrote:
               | Such an incredible amount of personal, intimate knowledge
               | to share with a company. Sure, Google can figure out
               | where I live and who I visit because I have an Android
               | phone, but they'll never know the contents of those
               | relationships.
               | 
               | I have a line in the sand with the AI vendors. It's a
               | work relationship. If I wouldn't share it with a
               | colleague I didn't know super well, I'm not telling it to
               | a AI vendor.
        
               | lkbm wrote:
               | I recently asked about baby-led weaning. If my baby were
               | 2 months old, it would have been smart to mention "not
               | yet!" but it knows she's 8 months old and was able to
               | give contextual advice.
        
             | IanCal wrote:
             | Can projects overlap? If not there's general context
             | information that's often useful.
             | 
             | My job, my kids and time preferences around those things,
             | my preferred tech setup and way of working and types of
             | tech I'm better at. Things I already have (home assistant,
             | little nuc, etc). I can throw a random question and not
             | have to add this kind of information or manage it.
        
               | deaux wrote:
               | I get that those are the things that go into memory. What
               | I don't get is what kind of prompt your job and kids are
               | useful information for. Especially on the regular.
        
               | IanCal wrote:
               | Let's see, recently:
               | 
               | Home automation fixing
               | 
               | Proposed integrations with some services locally
               | 
               | Science experiments explained at a few levels, finding
               | good background info and where to read up about some
               | safety information
               | 
               | Maths help for specific areas my kids are looking at and
               | proposed games for that
               | 
               | Evaluation of coding options for my kids
               | 
               | How to link up some ideas on coding, electronics and
               | using the home automation side as some fun outputs
               | 
               | LED strip info and work, again integrating with smart
               | homes and what's good around the kids
               | 
               | Framework evaluations for automation at work and home
               | 
               | Crystal identification
               | 
               | Looking up local council info
               | 
               | Relevant music suggestions for kids to play on the piano
               | 
               | Here some things cross over. I'm happy writing code, I
               | typically want easy open source options, I have languages
               | and tech I prefer, I'm moving g things to matter, I have
               | home assistant, my son is excellent at maths given his
               | age but I'm working more on comprehension of problems,
               | and a lot more. All those are things that with a bit of
               | background info change the types of answers I get and
               | make it more useful.
        
             | vishnugupta wrote:
             | I use it for my work. So i went it to remember everything
             | about my business, website, the domain, which country we
             | operate and on and on. It's a ton of context which I don't
             | want to repeat each time.
        
               | Kye wrote:
               | That's what projects are for. All the major chatbot
               | companies have some equivalent and all support a standard
               | instruction where you can include anything you need
               | automatically.
        
             | Mashimo wrote:
             | I asked chatgpt a car related question in a fresh chat, and
             | it answered it specifically with my car in mind.
             | 
             | Turns out a few month befor I told it in a prompt what car
             | I was driving.
             | 
             | I turned memory of that day.
        
             | peteforde wrote:
             | ChatGPT knows what's in my bar and what types of base
             | liquors I love and/or can't drink. It knows what fruit,
             | syrups and mixes are in my fridge. It knows that my friend
             | is allergic to mint. It knows that when I ask for
             | recommendations, I tend to want a choice between spirit
             | forward, tiki, martini and herbaceous.
             | 
             | ChatGPT knows the broad strokes of the 3-4 main hardware
             | projects I have on the go, and depending on the questions
             | I'm asking, it will often structure its responses in a way
             | that differentiates based on which one I'm thinking about.
             | 
             | It knows what resistor and capacitor values I have on my
             | pick and place machine, and when I ask for divider ratios
             | it will do its best to calculate based on those values to
             | the degree that it will chain 1-2 resistors together to
             | achieve those ratios.
             | 
             | I knows what kind of solder I use, and has warned me about
             | components with sensitive reflow temperature concerns.
             | 
             | It's an extraordinarily useful feature for engineering and
             | drinking, two things that are commonly found in the same
             | Venn diagram.
        
               | deaux wrote:
               | Thank you! That helped me understand. Hobbies that you
               | regularly do, and an LLM is continuously helpful for,
               | benefiting from memory.
               | 
               | Personally, I would still be wary of the black box aspect
               | -not knowing what it does remember and what it doesn't -
               | so I would probably still use projects to make it more
               | deterministic. But that's probably being overcautious and
               | unnecessary in most common cases.
        
               | lkbm wrote:
               | > It knows what resistor and capacitor values I have on
               | my pick and place machine, and when I ask for divider
               | ratios it will do its best to calculate based on those
               | values to the degree that it will chain 1-2 resistors
               | together to achieve those ratios.
               | 
               | Also relevant: it knows that you know what a resistor and
               | capacitor is, and is able to tune responses to your level
               | of knowledge. (It's not _great_ at this, in my
               | experience, since domain knowledge is still so jagged,
               | but I think it 's better than nothing.)
        
               | Peaches4Rent wrote:
               | It it just me who's getting freaked out by this?
               | 
               | I know it's a boiling frog situation, but seeing it spelt
               | out feels so icky vs how google ads feel.
               | 
               | I really want my personality data deleted from big
               | tech...
               | 
               | Sigh
        
             | ssl-3 wrote:
             | Sure.
             | 
             | ChatGPT "knows" (has context that includes) some of the
             | things I'm good at, and some of the things I'm not good at.
             | I have my own tolerances for communication and it has
             | context about that, too.
             | 
             | I use the bot for mostly techy things. So, for instance,
             | I'm alright with using tools, and building electronics, and
             | punting around on a Linux box so I don't need my hand held
             | for that. But I'm terrible at writing code, so baby steps
             | and detailed explanation there helps me a lot. I strongly
             | prefer pragmatism and verifiable facts. I despise sycophant
             | speech, the empty positivity of corpo-speak, assumptions,
             | false praise, superfluous verbosity, and apologies and/or
             | the implication of feelings from bots.
             | 
             | Through a combination of some deliberate training (custom
             | instructions, memory), and just using it (shared context),
             | it mostly does what I want in the way that I want it done
             | -- the first time.
             | 
             | I don't have to steer in the right direction with every new
             | session. There was a time when that was necessary, but it
             | is no longer that way. Adjustments happen increasingly
             | automatically these days.
             | 
             | That saves me time and frustration, and enhances the
             | utility of the bot.
             | 
             | Meanwhile: Others have their own skills and preferences
             | that may be very different in comparison to my own. That's
             | OK. We each get to have our own experience.
        
             | damontal wrote:
             | I broke my ankle and have multiple chats related to
             | medicine, physical therapy, pain management, lawyer
             | questions, how to handle messaging to boss and HR
        
             | foogazi wrote:
             | I will say graciously that seeing this question asked here
             | is absolutely stunning to me
             | 
             | If I ask a question about vehicles it know what cars I have
             | and what I like in cars
             | 
             | If I ask for a question about vacation spots it know my
             | parties composition or preferences
             | 
             | Things like that
        
         | AllegedAlec wrote:
         | In online Claude I often use incognito mode precisely because I
         | don't want results to be influenced by what we talked about
         | earlier. It's getting rather annoying to be honest.
        
           | qwertox wrote:
           | Keep your user prefs minimal and use project memory instead:
           | create a new project, it will only have access to your user
           | prefs, everything else is fresh.
        
             | KellyCriterion wrote:
             | exactly!
        
             | hbarka wrote:
             | I did /init and now CLAUDE.md is on several layers. I wish
             | there was a reverse init and minimum as needed init.
        
             | AllegedAlec wrote:
             | I'll have to try projects I guess, but I just want to
             | sometimes ask questions without it bringing up shit I asked
             | about in the past which isn't relevant to what I'm asking
             | this time.
        
           | Mashimo wrote:
           | Why not turn it off then?
        
           | visarga wrote:
           | I'm switching from Claude Web to Claude Code. Local files
           | give me memory I actually control, unlike Anthropic's
           | implementation. CC doesn't carry state between sessions --
           | you just put whatever project context it needs in a file.
        
         | pfix wrote:
         | I can try!
         | 
         | I currently use ChatGPT for random insights and discussions
         | about a variety of topics. The memory is basically a grown
         | context about me and my preferences and interests and ChatGPT
         | uses it to tailor responses to my knowledge, so I could relate
         | better.
         | 
         | This is for me far more natural and easier than either craft a
         | default prompt preset or create each conversation individually,
         | that would be way too much overhead to discuss random shower
         | thoughts between real life stuff.
         | 
         | This is my use case and I discovered that this can be
         | detrimental to specific questions and prompts and I see that it
         | can be more beneficial to have careful written prompts each
         | time. But my use case is really ad hoc usage without the time.
         | At least for ChatGPT.
         | 
         | When coding, this fails fast. There regular context resets seem
         | to be a more viable strategy.
        
           | wps wrote:
           | I see what you mean, but I like having a clean slate even for
           | those one off questions. I don't want a differing answer to a
           | philosophical inquiry just because the LLM remembers a prior
           | position I've written about you know?
        
             | e1g wrote:
             | FWIW, both OpenAI and Anthropic have a toggle to do a
             | "Temporary/Incognito Chat" that does not use or update
             | memory. I too wish this was the default, and then you could
             | opt in at the end of the chat to save some long term
             | aspects into memory.
        
               | pfix wrote:
               | That would be interesting, also at the start. As an
               | option what to pull in. ChatGPT memory "improved" and now
               | you normally don't even see anymore what it commits to
               | memory!
        
             | Retr0id wrote:
             | I have all the history settings off for this reason, but
             | something that worries me is that there's a fair bit of
             | information about me trained right into the model weights.
             | I'm not "famous" by any stretch but claude has awareness of
             | some of my HN-front-page-hitting projects, etc., which I
             | think should be enough to bias responses (although I
             | haven't tried to measure it).
             | 
             | I set my name to "User" in the settings, so in a clean-
             | slate chat it has nothing to go on, but the moment claude
             | code does something like `git log` it knows who I am again.
             | I've even considered writing some kind of redaction proxy.
        
         | jtokoph wrote:
         | I've told the LLMs that, when traveling, I don't care about
         | nightlife and alcohol. Because they have a memory of this, when
         | I ask for a sample itinerary for a 2 day stay in a new city, it
         | won't waste hours in the day on the party street, wine tasting,
         | etc.
         | 
         | For example, instead of recommending a popular night club, it
         | will recommend the stroll along the river to view the lit up
         | skyline or to visit the night market instead.
         | 
         | It knows other preferences as well (exploring quirky
         | neighborhoods, trying local fast food joints and markets)
        
           | cyrusmg wrote:
           | So it's because they want to be more like ChatGPT instead of
           | being more Claude Code. I guess that makes sense - bigger
           | market
        
             | echelon wrote:
             | Is it?
             | 
             | Isn't there much more money in automating business
             | processes than in answering consumer questions (sans ads)?
             | 
             | Automating software development has to be a multi-trillion
             | dollar market. And that doesn't account for future growth.
        
               | bluGill wrote:
               | maybe. Software is big, but it is only a tiny percentage
               | of the ecconomy. they need to help a lot more than
               | software to justify their datacenter investments. even if
               | we add all engineering that isn't a large percentage. How
               | can they help insurance agents (or eliminate - I don't
               | care either way), plumbers, zoo keepers, and every other
               | job in my city? Some might be they can't - but if they
               | can is a question worth asking.
        
         | 7734128 wrote:
         | The few times I've switched over to chatGPT I've been
         | dumbfounded by lines like "...since you already are using
         | SQLite...", referring to projects from months ago.
         | 
         | I know the "memory" function can be disabled, but I have a hard
         | time seeing that it would ever really be useful.
        
           | cedws wrote:
           | Yeah for me it only ever polluted the context. Irrelevant
           | information tends to oversteer the LLM and produce worse
           | output.
        
           | astrange wrote:
           | Gemini is terrible with personalization. It brings up
           | everything in my bio nonstop no matter what the topic is.
        
         | __alexander wrote:
         | The appeal for me is not having to constantly repeat
         | instructions. Imagine having to repeat dietary restrictions
         | every time you ask for a recipe.
        
         | bmurphy1976 wrote:
         | "Stop asking me to apply the plan. I will tell you when I'm
         | ready."
         | 
         | That alone drives me batty. I can easily spend a couple hours
         | and multiple revisions iterating on a plan. Asking me me every
         | single time if I want to apply it is obnoxious.
        
         | MagicMoonlight wrote:
         | Because I can say "do what you did before, but about the romans
         | this time"
         | 
         | And it will give me a complete rundown of Roman life, because
         | it knows what I was interested in before.
         | 
         | Or you can ask a tax question and it will know you're an
         | organic rice farmer or whatever. Claude has the best
         | implementation because it has both memory, and previous chat
         | searching. So it will actually read through relevant chats,
         | rather than guessing based on memories.
        
         | joenot443 wrote:
         | I own a lot of dirt bikes, boats, snowmobiles, mowers, and
         | blowers. It's much easier for me to ask about "My Polaris" than
         | it is to ask about my "2011 Polaris Switchback Assault".
         | 
         | Similarly, it remembers the dimensions of my truck, so
         | towing/loading questions don't need extra clarification.
         | 
         | It's the small things.
        
         | gverrilla wrote:
         | It all depends on your usecase(s). For me, "account-wide"
         | memory has only: (a) short description of my
         | hardware/os/display system/etc; (b) mobile hardware and os
         | version; and (c) my age, gender, city/country of residence, and
         | health conditions.
        
         | bouzouk wrote:
         | On the contrary, I cannot understand how people are seriously
         | using LLM outside of software engineering without account-wide
         | memory. When I ask things like "what do you think John should
         | do next on project A?", I don't want to have to explain in
         | detail who is John, what is project A and what John was working
         | on before.
        
         | Panoramix wrote:
         | Think of things like your preferred units (meters, kg, cups,
         | tablespoons, milliliters). Or, do not suggest recipes with x
         | ingredient. Language preferences. Etc etc etc.
        
       | siva7 wrote:
       | So Openai will have this same feature by tomorrow likely. A
       | feature to pollute your context window.
        
         | Barbing wrote:
         | I would've said they'd nerf the prompt:
         | 
         | >I'm moving to another service and need to export my data. List
         | every memory you have stored about me, as well as any context
         | you've learned about me from past conversations. Output
         | everything in a single code block so I can easily copy it.
         | Format each entry as: [date saved, if available] - memory
         | content. Make sure to cover all of the following -- preserve my
         | words verbatim where possible: Instructions I've given you
         | about how to respond (tone, format, style, 'always do X',
         | 'never do Y'). Personal details: name, location, job, family,
         | interests. Projects, goals, and recurring topics. Tools,
         | languages, and frameworks I use. Preferences and corrections
         | I've made to your behavior. Any other stored context not
         | covered above. Do not summarize, group, or omit any entries.
         | After the code block, confirm whether that is the complete set
         | or if any remain.
        
           | pfisherman wrote:
           | Would this actually return memories and context? How could
           | you know if parts or all of it were hallucinated?
        
             | jacquesm wrote:
             | You don't know that for sure for any output of these
             | models.
        
       | brikym wrote:
       | Hey Anthropic, how about you use AGENTS.md for one thing.
        
         | deaux wrote:
         | Now that would make it easier for Codex users to switch indeed!
         | This seems like the best timing for it they're ever gonna get,
         | and worth the ultra tiny loss of marketing value their
         | "CLAUDE.md" naming provides.
         | 
         | For the Anthropic employees here reading along, pitch it to
         | whoever has kept blocking this, because you need to get the
         | most out of this opportunity here.
        
         | 2001zhaozhao wrote:
         | Just make a symlink of CLAUDE.md -> AGENTS.md
         | 
         | I have seen quite a few open source projects do this. It works
         | quite well.
         | 
         | Another alternative is to create CLAUDE.md with the exact
         | contents: "@AGENTS.md"
        
           | deaux wrote:
           | Big projects should have a lot of nested AGENTS.md files,
           | it's inconvenient and they simply need to add support for the
           | universal standard as everyone else has done rather than
           | being a weird holdout like IE6.
        
           | brikym wrote:
           | We all know it's easy... so why don't Anthropic do it. Seems
           | rather petty insisting their users put advertising in their
           | repo or someone else's repo.
        
         | silverwind wrote:
         | +1, https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/6235 is
         | probably the most upvoted github issue that i've seen.
        
         | Sammi wrote:
         | Before this week I was sure Anthropic were actually just as
         | soulless as OpenAi, just because they don't support open
         | standards like AGENTS.md and /.agents/skills. They can so
         | easily win the support of the open source crowd if they just
         | support open standards like these.
         | 
         | The /.agents/skills issue for claude code is here:
         | https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/16345
         | 
         | Their automatic close bot will close it soon as it's been three
         | weeks since the last comment.
        
           | cma wrote:
           | Why not just symlink
        
             | Sammi wrote:
             | Why not just use a lightning to usb-c adapter? Because
             | proprietary interfaces are for building monopolies and
             | standards are for breaking them.
        
         | Handy-Man wrote:
         | Why would they? They were first with CLAUDE.md. Others could
         | have adopted to that if they wanted. Don't see a reason for
         | Claude to change their approach.
        
           | kelnos wrote:
           | Being a good citizen of the commons means not hard-coding
           | things specific about your product as a standard. ChatGPT or
           | Gemini using a file called "CLAUDE" doesn't make sense. The
           | first mover doesn't just automatically win.
        
         | tomComb wrote:
         | I felt that way too, until I noticed how different their
         | schemes are for discovering these files, e.g. Claude will pick
         | up context files in parent folders, and Codex doesn't.
         | 
         | Maybe it's better that they maintain different names to prevent
         | people from assuming that they work the same
        
       | knallfrosch wrote:
       | I'd be happy if I was able to use Claude Code _at all_
       | 
       | VSCode extension, "Please log in"
       | 
       | I authorize it, it creates an API key, callback. "Hello Claude,
       | this is a test." "Please log in."
       | 
       | So yeah... priorities?
        
         | pfisherman wrote:
         | Why not use Claude Code from the cli and follow along in your
         | IDE? I did not quite believe when people were telling me or
         | understand what I was missing until I tried it, but after
         | trying that set up I am convinced that it is superior. I don't
         | have any hard data to back it up, but it feels much more
         | capable that way.
        
           | Mashimo wrote:
           | AFAIK the claude vs code plugin uses claude code under the
           | hood.
           | 
           | I recent switched from vs code copilot to open code and I
           | kinda miss it. Just selecting text and directly asking the
           | chat. Or seeing the generated code in the ide to accept it
           | reject it. It's neat.
        
       | Joeri wrote:
       | I already switched to claude a while ago. Didn't bring along any
       | context, just switched subscriptions, walked away from chatgpt
       | and haven't touched it again. Turned out to be a non-event, there
       | really is no moat.
       | 
       | I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the
       | things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI
       | are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I'm
       | pretty sure they would allow AGI to be used for truly evil
       | purposes, and the events of this week have only convinced me
       | further.
        
         | KellyCriterion wrote:
         | > there really is no moat.
         | 
         | For ChatGPT and Gemini, yes.
         | 
         | But for Claude, they have a very deep & big one: Its the only
         | model that gets production ready output on the first detailled
         | prompt. Yesterday I used my tokens til noon, so I tried some
         | output from Gemini & Co. I presented a working piece of code
         | which is already in production:
         | 
         | 1. It changed without noticing things like
         | "Touple.First.Date.Created" and "Touple.Second.Date.Created"
         | and it rendered the code unworking by chaning to
         | "Touple.FirstDate" and "Touple.SecondDate"
         | 
         | 2. There was a const list of 12 definitions for a given
         | context, when telling to rewrite the function it just cut 6 of
         | these 12 definitions, making the code not compiling - I asked
         | why they were cut: "Sorry, I was just too lazy typing" ?? LOL
         | 
         | 3. There is a list include holding some items "_allGlobalItems"
         | - it changed the name in the function simply to "_items", code
         | didnt compile
         | 
         | As said, a working version of a similar function was given
         | upfront.
         | 
         | With Claude, I never have such issues.
        
           | ben_w wrote:
           | That's been my experience too. I'm using the recent free
           | trial of OpenAI Plus to vibe code, and from this I would say
           | that if Claude Code is a junior with 1-3 years of experience,
           | OpenAI's Codex is like a student coder.
        
             | Oreb wrote:
             | Does it depend on what type of programming you do? Doing
             | Swift/SwiftUI work, I have exactly the opposite experience.
             | I've been using both recently, and I _want_ to use Claude
             | alone (especially after the last week's events), but Codex
             | is just so much faster and better.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Swift/SwiftUI are two of the three experimental projects
               | I'm using Codex on, the other is a physics simulation in
               | python.
               | 
               | It keeps trying to re-invent the wheel, does a bad job of
               | it.
               | 
               | The physics sim was supposed to be a thin wrapper around
               | existing libraries, but instead of that it tried to write
               | all the simulation code itself as a "fallback" (but it
               | was broken), and never actually installed the real
               | simulators that already did this stuff despite being told
               | to use them in the first place. The last few dozen(!)
               | prompts from me have been pairs of ~["Find all cases
               | where you've re-invented the wheel, add them to the
               | planning document", "now do them"]. And it's still not
               | finished removing the original nonsense, so far as I can
               | tell.
               | 
               | One of the two Swift experiments is just a dice roller,
               | it took about 10 rounds of non-compiling metal shaders (I
               | don't know metal, which is why I didn't give up and do
               | that by hand after 4) before I managed to get that to
               | work, and when it did work it immediately broke it again
               | on the next four rounds. It wrote its own chart instead
               | of using Swift Charts, and did it badly. It tried to put
               | all the hamburger menu options into a UIAlertController.
               | Something blocks the UI for several seconds when you
               | change the dice font. I didn't count how many attempts it
               | took to correctly label the D4.
               | 
               | The other Swift experiment was a musical instrument app,
               | that got me to the prototype stage, eventually, but in a
               | way that still felt like a student's project rather than
               | a junior's project.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | (Just outside edit window, I now realise I was ambiguous
               | in this comment, it was more like "Find all cases where
               | you've re-invented the wheel, add their removal to the
               | planning document")
        
               | skeledrew wrote:
               | > Find all cases where you've re-invented the wheel
               | 
               | Did you put in the original prompt the "wheels" you
               | wanted it to use? It's a toss-up when you aren't _very_
               | specific about what you want.
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | For the swift apps, at least half of the errors are of a
               | type where I wouldn't expect to have _needed_ to tell
               | someone to not do it like that, and only a student could
               | reasonably be expected to not know better.
               | 
               | For the python physics sim, step 1 was to generate the
               | plan, the prompt included "I want actual plasma physics,
               | including high-density, high-field regimes, externally
               | applied fields, etc., so consider which FOSS libraries
               | would suit this.", and then it proceeded itself to choose
               | some existing libraries, and I made sure those specific
               | named FOSS libraries actually ended up in the plan.
               | 
               | My first clue this wasn't going to work was that even
               | from step 1 it was pushing for writing all the simulation
               | code and not actually using e.g. WarpX despite that it
               | itself had suggested WarpX. In fact, even when WarpX was
               | in the plan, it was "integrate" rather than "just use
               | this from the get-go".
               | 
               | I may well throw the whole thing out and try again with
               | Claude when this trial expires. Most of the runs have
               | been comically non-physical, to the extent you don't even
               | need a physics degree to notice, or even a physics GCSE.
        
               | boxedemp wrote:
               | I find it very much matters. I find Gemini better for
               | pretty frontends, Claude opus for planning. Gemini and
               | opus for code reviews. Codex is great when I want the LLM
               | do follow instructions more strictly- good if you already
               | have a detailed design.
               | 
               | Definitely depends on your use.
        
           | littlestymaar wrote:
           | > But for Claude, they have a very deep & big one: Its the
           | only model that gets production ready output on the first
           | detailled promp
           | 
           | That's not a moat though. Claude itself wasn't there 6 months
           | ago and there's no reason to think Chinese open models won't
           | be at this level in a year at most.
           | 
           | To keep its current position Claude has to keep improving at
           | the same pace as the competitor.
        
           | ptnpzwqd wrote:
           | I have used Claude (incl. Opus 4.6) fairly extensively, and
           | Claude still spits out quality that is far below what I would
           | call production ready - both littered with smaller issues,
           | but also the occasional larger blunder. Particularly when
           | doing anything non-trivial, and even when guiding it in
           | detail (although that admittedly reduces the amount of larger
           | structural issues).
           | 
           | Maybe it is tech stack dependent (I have mostly used it with
           | C#/.NET), but I have heard people say the same for C#. The
           | only conclusion I have been able to draw from this, is that
           | people have very different definitions of production ready,
           | but I would really like to see some concrete evidence where
           | Claude one-shots a larger/complex C# feature or the like
           | (with or without detailed guidance).
        
             | je42 wrote:
             | Interesting - what kind of structural issues have you
             | encountered?
             | 
             | Is these more related to the existing source code or is
             | this a bad pattern thar you would never do regardless of
             | the existing code?
        
             | peteforde wrote:
             | I see this over and over again. I don't dispute your
             | experience. My experience with ESP32 development has been
             | unreasonably positive. My codebase is sitting around 600k
             | LoC and is the product of several hundred Opus 4.x Plan ->
             | Agent -> Debug loops. I review everything that goes
             | through, but I'm reviewing the business logic and domain
             | gotchas, not dumb crap like what you and so many others
             | describe.
             | 
             | What is so strange to me is that surely there is more C#
             | out there than ESP-IDF code? I don't have a good
             | explanation beyond saying that my codebase is extensively
             | tested and used; I would know _very_ quickly if it suddenly
             | started shitting the bed in the way you explain.
        
               | ivan_gammel wrote:
               | The more code is out there, the worse is the average in
               | the training dataset. There will be legacy approaches and
               | APIs, poor design choices, popular use cases irrelevant
               | for your context etc that increase the chances of output
               | not matching your expectations. In Java world this is
               | exactly how it works. I need 3-5 iterations with Claude
               | to get things done the way I expect, sometimes jumping
               | straight to manual refactoring and then returning the
               | result to Claude for review and learning. My CLAUDE.md
               | (multiple of them) are growing big with all patterns and
               | anti-patterns identified this way. To overcome this
               | problem model needs specialized training, that I don't
               | think the industry knows how to approach (it has to beat
               | the effort put in the education system for humans).
        
               | re-thc wrote:
               | > To overcome this problem model needs specialized
               | training, that I don't think the industry knows how to
               | approach
               | 
               | We already have coding tuned models i.e. Codex. We should
               | just have language / technology specific models with a
               | focus on recent / modern usage.
               | 
               | Problem with something like Java is too old -- too many
               | variants. Make a cut off like at least above Java 8 or
               | 17.
        
               | mjdiloreto wrote:
               | I also believe this must be true. Try asking Claude to
               | program in Forth, I find the results to be unreasonably
               | good. That's probably because most of the available Forth
               | to train on is high quality.
        
               | xienze wrote:
               | > My experience with ESP32 development has been
               | unreasonably positive. My codebase is sitting around 600k
               | LoC and is the product of several hundred Opus 4.x Plan
               | -> Agent -> Debug loops.
               | 
               | I feel like this is an example of people having different
               | standards of what "good" code is and hence the differing
               | opinions of how good these tools are. I'm not an embedded
               | developer but 600K LOC seems like a lot in that context,
               | doesn't it? Again I could be way off base here but that
               | sounds like there must be a lot of spaghetti and copy-
               | paste all over the codebase for it to end up that large.
        
               | surajrmal wrote:
               | I don't think it's that large. Keep in mind embedded
               | projects take few if any dependencies. The standard
               | library in most languages is far bigger than 600k loc.
        
               | whaleidk wrote:
               | I work with ESP32 devices and 600k lines of code is
               | insane.
        
               | the__alchemist wrote:
               | I'm curious: What does this device do?
        
               | whaleidk wrote:
               | 600k lines of code for anything on the ESP32 sounds like
               | the absolute polar opposite of "good"
        
             | KellyCriterion wrote:
             | > C#/.NET
             | 
             | same here :)
             | 
             | > one-shots a larger/complex C# feature
             | 
             | I can show you a timeseries data-renderer which was created
             | with 1 initial very large prompt and then 3 following
             | "change this and that" prompts. The file is around 5000
             | lines and everything works fine & exactly as specified.
        
               | ptnpzwqd wrote:
               | Feel free to share it, would be very curious - ideally
               | alongside the prompts.
        
               | KellyCriterion wrote:
               | Do you have an email address?
        
               | ptnpzwqd wrote:
               | You can use this: hnthrowaway.outboard407@passmail.net
        
               | allajfjwbwkwja wrote:
               | > The file is around 5000 lines
               | 
               | Yep, this is another case of different standards for
               | "production ready."
        
               | KellyCriterion wrote:
               | Caught, good one! :-))
               | 
               | ++1
        
             | skeledrew wrote:
             | I don't get it though. Why do you expect perfect responses?
             | Humans continually make mistakes, and AI is trained on
             | human data. Yet there seems to be this higher bar of
             | expectation for the latter. Somehow people expect this
             | thing that's been around for a few weeks/months, and cannot
             | learn anything more beyond its training cutoff date, to
             | always do a better job than a human who's been around for
             | 20+ years and is able to learn on their own until death.
        
               | ptnpzwqd wrote:
               | I don't expect that - am merely responding to the parent
               | comments claim that Claude consistently one-shots
               | production ready code (which does not at all match my
               | observations).
        
           | AlecSchueler wrote:
           | > Its the only model that gets production ready output on the
           | first detailled prompt. Yesterday I used my tokens til noon,
           | so I tried some output from Gemini & Co. I presented a
           | working piece of code which is already in production:
           | 
           | One does often hear that where LLMs shine is with greenfield
           | code generation but they all start to struggle working with
           | pre-existing code. It could be that this wasn't a like for
           | like comparison.
           | 
           | That said I do personally feel Claude to produce far better
           | results than competitors.
        
             | jacquesm wrote:
             | > One does often hear that where LLMs shine is with
             | greenfield code generation but they all start to struggle
             | working with pre-existing code.
             | 
             | Don't we all?
        
               | seba_dos1 wrote:
               | Nope.
        
               | AlecSchueler wrote:
               | Whether we do or not it's besides the point. The
               | comparison was between Claude, which produced competent
               | greenfield code, and Gemini which struggled with
               | brownfield. The comparison is stacked in Claude's favour.
        
               | astrange wrote:
               | I'm better at pre-existing code, if only because empty
               | text files give me writers block.
        
             | ivan_gammel wrote:
             | Greenfield implementation is not flawless as well.
        
               | ajshahH wrote:
               | The only sources of these "it works flawlessly" I know of
               | are:
               | 
               | - literal Claude ads I see online
               | 
               | - my underperforming coworkers whose code I've had to
               | cleanup and know first hand that no, it wasn't flawless
               | 
               | This kind of sentiment is gaslighting CTOs everywhere
               | though. Very annoying.
        
             | piva00 wrote:
             | > One does often hear that where LLMs shine is with
             | greenfield code generation but they all start to struggle
             | working with pre-existing code. It could be that this
             | wasn't a like for like comparison.
             | 
             | In my experience working in a large codebase with a good
             | set of standards that's not the case, I can supply examples
             | already existing in the codebase for Claude to use as a
             | guidance and it generates quite decent code.
             | 
             | I think it's because there's already a lot of decent code
             | for it to slurp and derive from, good quality tests at the
             | functional level (so regressions are caught quickly).
             | 
             | I do understand though that on codebases with a hodge podge
             | of styles, varying quality of tests, etc. it probably
             | doesn't work as well as in my experience but I'm quite
             | impressed about how I can do the thinking, add relevant
             | sections of the code to the context (including protocols,
             | APIs, etc.), describe what I need to be done, and get a
             | plan back that most times is correct or very close to
             | correct, which I can then iterate over to fix gaps/mistakes
             | it made, and get it implemented.
             | 
             | Of course, there are still tasks it fails and I don't like
             | doing multiple iterations to correct course, for those I do
             | them manually with the odd usage here and there to refactor
             | bits and pieces.
             | 
             | Overall I believe if your codebase was already healthy you
             | can have LLMs work quite well with pre-existing code.
        
           | otabdeveloper4 wrote:
           | > Its the only model that gets production ready output on the
           | first detailled prompt.
           | 
           | That's, just, like, your opinion, man.
        
             | KellyCriterion wrote:
             | ...and of a lot of colleagues in and out of my sector :)
        
         | rustyhancock wrote:
         | I know this is necessarily a very unpopular opinion however.
         | 
         | I think HN in particular as a crowd are very vulnerable to the
         | halo effect and group think when it comes to Anthropic.
         | 
         | Even being generous they are only very minimally a "better
         | actor" than OpenAI.
         | 
         | However, we are so enthralled by their product that we tend to
         | let the view bleed over to their ethics.
         | 
         | Saying we want out tools used in line with the US constitution
         | within the US on one particular point. Is hardly a high moral
         | bar, it's self preservation.
         | 
         | All Anthropic have said is:
         | 
         | 1. No mass domestic surveillance of Americans.
         | 
         | 2. No fully autonomous lethal weapons yet.
         | 
         | My goodness that's what passes for a high moral standard?
         | Really anything that doesn't hit those very carefully worded
         | points is not "evil"?
        
           | earthnail wrote:
           | Well, they did stand up to the US administration and lost a
           | lot of money in the process. That takes courage. They clearly
           | were being bullied into compliance, and they stood their
           | ground.
           | 
           | You can see the significance of this is you look at German
           | Nazi history. If more companies had stood up to the
           | administration, the Nazi state would have been significantly
           | harder to build.
           | 
           | In my opinion, what Anthropic did is not a small thing at
           | all.
        
             | rustyhancock wrote:
             | The comment I replied to said that they believed OpenAI
             | would allow "AGI to be used for truly evil purposes".
             | 
             | By contrast Anthropic wouldn't? Yet Anthropics stance is
             | only two narrow restrictions. As I said are those two
             | things the only evil things possible?
             | 
             | If not, why is it that people on HN think Anthropic would
             | not allow evil usage?
             | 
             | My hypothesis is a halo effect. We are so enthralled by
             | Claudes performance that some struggle to rationally assess
             | what Anthropic has actually done.
             | 
             | Yes it's no small thing to say no to the Trump
             | administration but that does not mean they haven't said Yes
             | to otherwise facilitated other evils.
             | 
             | In fact to me the statements from Anthropic seem to make
             | clear they are okay with many evils.
        
               | thunky wrote:
               | > Yet Anthropics stance is only two narrow restrictions.
               | 
               | Really I think Anthropic should have a single
               | restriction: to not assist with illegal or
               | unconstitutional activities. If automated killings etc is
               | illegal then it would be covered by that one rule.
               | 
               | I don't think Anthropic should be in the business of
               | deciding what is "evil".
        
               | toss1 wrote:
               | If each of us individually or as corporations should not
               | be in the business of deciding what it "evil", who should
               | be in that business?
               | 
               | Everyone _SHOULD_ continuously consider, decide, and live
               | by moral judgements and codes they internalize, and use
               | to make choices in life.
               | 
               | This aspect of life should _NEVER_ be outsourced -- of
               | course, learn from and use codes others have developed
               | and lived by -- but _ALWAYS_ consider deeply how it works
               | in your situation and life.
               | 
               | (And no, I do _NOT_ mean use situational ethics, I mean
               | each considering, choosing, and internalizing the codes
               | by which they live).
               | 
               | So, yes, Anthropic and anyone else building products
               | absolutely should be deciding for themselves what they
               | will build, for what purposes it is fit to use, and
               | telling others about those purposes. For products like
               | AI, this absolutely includes deciding what is "evil" and
               | preventing such uses.
               | 
               | If the customer finds such restrictions are not what they
               | want, they _ARE FREE_ to not use the product.
        
               | thunky wrote:
               | > If each of us individually or as corporations should
               | not be in the business of deciding what it "evil", who
               | should be in that business?
               | 
               | This is easy imo. Two methods:
               | 
               | 1. The law. It should not be legal for the US Govt to
               | murder people at will. If it is legal, then of course
               | they'll use tools to make it easier. Maybe AI, maybe
               | Clippy. If they can't use AI then they'll fall back to
               | using some other way of doing it like they've already
               | been doing for several years.
               | 
               | 2. Voting. For representatives that actually represent us
               | and have our interest in mind rather than their own
               | corrupt interests. And voting with our wallet against
               | companies that do legal but morally bankrupt things.
               | 
               | Of course we're failing both of these hard right now. But
               | imo the answer is not to give up and let corporations
               | make the rules.
               | 
               | In other words, if it were legal for a normal citizen to
               | murder anyone they wanted, of course they'll use Google
               | Maps to help them do that. We don't put restrictions on
               | how people can use Google Maps. Instead we've made murder
               | illegal. We should be doing the same thing here.
        
           | JauntyHatAngle wrote:
           | Lets generalise a bit more here - every company at any time
           | could completely heel-turn and do awful things. Even my
           | favourite private companies (e.g. Valve) have done things
           | that I would consider evil.
           | 
           | However, I would think I'm not alone in that I'm generally
           | wanting to do good while also wanting convenience, I know
           | that really every bit of consumption I do is probably
           | negative in some ways, and there is no real "apolitical"
           | action anyone can take.
           | 
           | But can't I at least get annoyed and take my money somewhere
           | else for the short amount of time another company is doing it
           | better?
           | 
           | Yes, if openAI suddenly leaps forwards with codex and pounds
           | anthropic into the dust, I'll likely switch back despite my
           | moral grievances, but in a situation where I can get mildly
           | motivated to jump over for something that - to me - seems
           | like a better morality without much punishment to me, I'll do
           | it.
        
             | bluGill wrote:
             | There are no universial morals. Anything - everything you
             | think is evil some culture (possibly in history) thinks is
             | good). I can't even think of something good that I'm
             | confident everyone would agree is good.
             | 
             | there are some people (companies are run by people) that
             | are so bad I boycott them. Most bad I treat like society
             | cannot work without accepting them anyway.
        
               | codechicago277 wrote:
               | There's no possibility or need for morality to be
               | universal, and societies have improved their ethics many
               | times throughout history. Your take is nihilistic and
               | presupposes that moral progress isn't possible, even
               | though we've seen objective moral progress many times.
        
           | jacquesm wrote:
           | It's not high. But it is higher.
        
             | rustyhancock wrote:
             | We'll take anything we can right now. I agree.
             | 
             | Although we shouldn't let that mean we misjudge what we are
             | actually getting.
        
               | jacquesm wrote:
               | As a rule when there are large companies and/or
               | billionaires involved you are in for trouble.
        
           | ekianjo wrote:
           | Let's not forget they also lobby to forbid models from China
           | and pretend that distillation is stealing. but somehow just
           | because they said no to two points the majority of HN folks
           | think them as virtuous.
        
         | Gooblebrai wrote:
         | Claude still doesn't have image generation?
        
           | nkmnz wrote:
           | Interesting. Have been using Gemini, Gpt and Claude
           | extensively in parallel and never noticed that.
        
           | Sammi wrote:
           | Image generation isn't what most devs spend most of their
           | time on?
        
           | wongarsu wrote:
           | It is semi-competent at making SVGs. Which are the only kind
           | of images I really need in dev work.
           | 
           | For marketing or personal stuff I do sometimes want images,
           | but I don't really mind going somewhere else for that
        
           | toss1 wrote:
           | I'm switching over to Claude from OpenAI, and I don't care.
           | OpenAI's image generation is terrible anyway. Just try to get
           | it to generate something to scale, like a cabinet for a
           | specific kitchen or bathroom space. Give it all the explicit
           | constraints, initial sketches, etc. it wants.
           | 
           | The results are laughably bad.
           | 
           | Sure, it does get some of the tones and features, but any
           | kind of actual real-world constraint is so far off, and the
           | dimension indicators it includes are hilarious if they
           | weren't so bad.
        
         | jacquesm wrote:
         | > I'm pretty sure they would allow AGI to be used for truly
         | evil purposes
         | 
         | It's perfectly possible that 'truly evil purposes' were the
         | goal all along. Slogans and ethics departments are mere speed
         | bumps on the way to generational wealth.
        
         | crossroadsguy wrote:
         | I wrote off ChatGPT/OpenAI because of Sam Altman and those
         | eyeball scan things - so sort of even before all this was a
         | rage and centre stage. Sometimes it's just the gut feeling, and
         | while it may not always be accurate, if something doesn't
         | "feel" right, maybe it is not right. No one else is all good
         | either, but what I mean to say is there are some
         | entities/people who repeatedly don't feel right, have things
         | attached to them that never felt right, etc., and you get a
         | combined "gut feeling". At least that's how it was for me.
        
         | kdheiwns wrote:
         | Yesterday was my first time trying it. One thing that felt a
         | bit strange to me was that I asked it something and the
         | response was just one paragraph. Which isn't bad or anything
         | but it felt... strange? Like I always need to preface
         | ChatGPT/gemini/whatever question with "Briefly, what is..." or
         | it gives me enough fluff to fill a 5 page high school essay.
         | But I didn't need to do that and just got an answer that was to
         | the point and without loads of shit that's barely related.
         | 
         | And the weirdest thing that I noticed: instead of skimming the
         | response to try finding what was relevant, I just straight up
         | read it. Kind of felt like I got a slight amount of focus
         | ability back.
         | 
         | Accuracy is something I can't really compare yet (all chatbots
         | feel generally the same for non-pro level queries), but so far,
         | I'm fairly satisfied.
        
           | mavamaarten wrote:
           | In my limited experience, that's mostly since the 4.6
           | release. I noticed that with the same prompt, it answers much
           | more briefly. A bit jarring indeed, but I prefer it. Less bs
           | and filler, and less burning off electricity for nothing.
        
             | xmonkee wrote:
             | It's probably an offshoot of making Claude more and more
             | suitable for code/cowork.
        
             | ACCount37 wrote:
             | This behavior first appeared in 4.5, mostly for specific
             | types of questions and in "natural conversation" workflows.
             | 4.6 might have pushed it further.
        
           | esperent wrote:
           | > Which isn't bad or anything but it felt... strange?
           | 
           | On the contrary, it's _great_. It 's fully capable of
           | outputting a wall of text when required, so instead of
           | feeling like I'm talking to something that has a minimum word
           | count requirement, I get an appropriate sized response to the
           | task at hand.
        
           | Sharlin wrote:
           | Heh, a while ago I wondered why ChatGPT had started to reply
           | tersely, almost laconically. Then I remembered that I had
           | explicitly told it to be brief by default in the custom
           | personality settings... I also noticed that there are now
           | various sliders to control things like how many emojis or
           | bulletpoint lists ChatGPT should use, which I though was
           | amusing. Anyway, these tools can be customized to adopt just
           | about any style, there's no need to always prefix questions
           | with "Briefly" or similar.
        
             | andai wrote:
             | Here's my prompt to make ChatGPT sound more like Claude.
             | 
             | It works but not as well as I'd like -- the tone and word
             | choice still ends up being really jarring to me (even after
             | years of using ChatGPT). Maybe that's promptable too. Open
             | to suggestions.
             | 
             | ---
             | 
             | Respond in a natural conversational style. In terms of
             | language, match my own tone and style.
             | 
             | Keep responses to half a page or so max. (Use context and
             | your judgment. e.g. for example, initial response can be a
             | page, and then specific follow up questions can be shorter,
             | if the question is answered clearly)
             | 
             | Prefer minimal formatting. Don't use headings, lists etc.
             | Bold and italics OK but keep it tasteful.
             | 
             | If you're starting a paragraph like so
             | 
             | Item name: description..
             | 
             | then it makes sense to bold item name for readability
             | purposes.
        
             | AgentOrange1234 wrote:
             | Hah. I remember some story about a chatbot that had been
             | trained on slack conversations. You would ask it for an
             | essay on whatever, and it would say "will do" or "I'll have
             | it for you tomorrow." :)
        
           | layer8 wrote:
           | One issue is that Claude's web search abilities are more
           | limited, for example it can't search Reddit and Stack
           | Overflow for relevant content.
        
             | samhclark wrote:
             | That's so frustrating with Claude. If I need to widely
             | search the web or if I need it to read a specific URL I
             | pasted, I always turn to ChatGPT. Claude seems to hit a lot
             | more roadblocks while trying to navigate the web.
        
               | ronsor wrote:
               | They're playing too nice. It's time to roll out the
               | residential proxies.
        
               | godelski wrote:
               | The issue is Reddit though. They're the ones blocking.
               | They're very aggressive.
               | 
               | When sites are working in one chatbot and not another,
               | there's a good chance that the latter is respecting the
               | website rules. As an example with Reddit, you're probably
               | blocked when using a VPN like Mullvad
        
             | andai wrote:
             | It's not that hard to roll your own web search MCP.
             | 
             | I made one for Crush a while ago.
             | 
             | https://anduil.neocities.org/blog/?page=mcp
             | 
             | I'm not sure about the issues with reddit though? Do they
             | block Claude's web fetch tool? I think Codex runs it thru
             | some kind of cache proxy.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | Rolling your own is not the solution for the common case
               | where you're asking an LLM a question that may or may not
               | be supported or supplemented by a web search. ChatGPT
               | decides by itself when and how to consult the web, and
               | then links the relevant sources in its result. You don't
               | get that functionality from Claude chat, you'd have to
               | completely build your own chat harness and apps.
               | 
               | Sites like Reddit are blocking AI providers, they have to
               | have some contract with them for access. OpenAI does seem
               | to have that.
        
             | MrDarcy wrote:
             | That's a feature not a bug.
        
             | bredren wrote:
             | Why not just write a skill and script that calls crawl4ai
             | or similar and do this using Claude code?
             | 
             | You can store the page as markdown for future sessions,
             | mash the data w other context, you name it.
             | 
             | The web Claude is incredibly limited both in capability and
             | workflow integration. Doesn't matter if you're dealing with
             | bids from arbor contractors or researching solutions for a
             | DB problem.
        
               | layer8 wrote:
               | See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47208741.
        
               | Barbing wrote:
               | Want this w/o killing the free open web.
               | 
               | Maybe I run an old PC adjacent to the scraper to manually
               | visit the scraped pages without an adblocker, & buy
               | something I need from an ad periodically (while a
               | cohesive response is being generated in the meantime)
               | 
               | Ya sounds dumb, wishing for a middle ground that lets us
               | be effective but also good netizens. Maybe that
               | Cloudflare plan to charge the bots...
        
           | skeledrew wrote:
           | Yep the experience is quite something. Another thing I've
           | noticed, and you likely soon will also, is that Claude only
           | attempts a follow-up if the one is needed or the prompt is
           | structured for it. Meanwhile ChatGPT always prompts you with
           | a choice of next steps. It can be nice, as sometimes the
           | options contain improvements you never thought of and would
           | like, but in lengthy conversations with a detailed plan it
           | does things really piecemeal, as though trained to maximize
           | engagement instead of getting to a final solution.
        
             | zukzuk wrote:
             | I find that Claude almost always ends its response with
             | some sort of follow up question, despite my system prompt
             | telling it not to.
             | 
             | I never really used ChatGPT much though so maybe Claude is
             | just relatively less egregious?
        
           | lkbm wrote:
           | Yeah, I've always been a little confused why people use
           | ChatGPT so heavily. It's better than it used to be (maybe
           | thanks to custom configuration), but it still tends to
           | respond like it's writing a Wikipedia article.
           | 
           | Wikipedia articles on demand are great, but not usually what
           | I want.
        
           | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
           | I use Gemini all the time, but I have to say it's got verbal
           | diarrhea and an EXTREMELY annoying trait of wanting to lead
           | the conversation rather than just responding to what YOU want
           | to do. At the end of every response Gemini will always
           | suggest a "next step", in effect trying to 2nd guess where
           | you want the conversation to go. I'd much rather have an AI
           | that just did what it was asked, and let me decide what to
           | ask next (often nothing - maybe it was just a standalone
           | question!).
           | 
           | Apparently this annoying "next step" behavior is driven by
           | the system prompt, since the other day I was running Gemini 3
           | Thinking, and it was displaying it's thoughts which included
           | a reminder to itself to check that it was maintaining a
           | consistent persona, and to make sure that it had suggested a
           | next step. I'd love to know the thought process of whoever at
           | Google thought that this would make for a natural or useful
           | conversation flow! Could you imagine trying to have a
           | conversation with a human who insisted on doing this?!
        
             | vrosas wrote:
             | I don't know, I've found the follow ups nice sometimes. You
             | can just ignore them if they're not useful. The computer
             | won't get mad...
        
               | HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
               | I find they are extremely rarely useful - they just break
               | my own chain of thought by having to constantly read and
               | ignore this stuff. The same goes for the excessively
               | verbose responses too - a human has a limited "context
               | window" and a shorter response is therefore much more
               | useful/valuable than a long token-maxxed one.
               | 
               | Sure the computer won't get mad, and that is all I do -
               | just ignore what Gemini is suggesting and pretend it
               | never said it - but it certainly makes _me_ mad. The main
               | reason I stick with Gemini is because of the generous
               | free usage limits, but I know this annoying  "next step"
               | behavior (which was a relatively recent change) is going
               | to push me back to Claude, even if I need to pay for it.
        
             | edoceo wrote:
             | Yes. That is a salesperson. The next-step is to drive
             | engagement. I know you're not interested in $THiNG now but
             | can I follow up in 3 months?
             | 
             | In persona I think the AIs are that Claude is the engineer
             | and Gemini is the sales-person and GPT is the eager and
             | loud journeyman.
        
             | debo_ wrote:
             | Yes. Gemini is mimicking its creators: this is exactly how
             | I experienced speaking to most Googlers.
        
         | bossyTeacher wrote:
         | I tried Claude recently (after they dropped the nonsensical
         | requirement to give them your phone number) and I was surprised
         | to see how significantly less sycophant it was. Chatgpt, unless
         | you are talking hard science, tends to be overly agreeable.
         | Claude questions you a lot (you ask for x and it asks you stuff
         | like: why are you interested in x, or based on our previous
         | convo, x might not be suitable to you, or I see your point but
         | based on our previous convo, y is better than x, etc). Chatgpt
         | rarely does that.
         | 
         | Of course, also OpenAI being ran by openly questionable people
         | while Dario so far doesn't seem nowhere near as bad even if
         | none of them are angels.
        
         | samiv wrote:
         | I did the same thing and cancelled my OpenAI plan today.
         | Besides boycotting it for their latest grifting I also found it
         | to not really produce much value in my use cases.
         | 
         | Moving back to doing this archaic thing called using my own
         | brain to do my work. Shocking.
        
         | mannanj wrote:
         | Yes they have a great marketing team and a powerful astro
         | turfing presence though, especially with the recent "Claude
         | beat up OpenClaw! OpenAI is supporting the community by buying
         | it!" and that nonsense.
         | 
         | Though tbh I hardly feel Claude is innocent either. When their
         | safety engineer/leader left, I didn't see any statements from
         | the Anthropic team not one addressing the legitimate points of
         | his for why he left. Instead we got an eager over-push in the
         | media cycle of "Anthropic standing up to DOD! Here's why you
         | can trust us!"
         | 
         | It's all sounds too similar to propaganda and astroturfing to
         | me.
        
         | bko wrote:
         | I never understood the point of this kind of comment. It
         | doesn't add any value or anything to the discussion. Its
         | basically two paragraphs with some presupposition (openai bad)
         | and how the author is virtuous by canceling his subscription.
         | No explanation, argument, nuance. Its just virtue signaling.
         | Actually... I guess I do know the point of this kind of
         | comment. I just don't know why these kinds of comments get
         | upvoted, even if you do agree openai bad
        
         | Buttons840 wrote:
         | I love no mote!
         | 
         | One day I'd like to create a server in my basement that just
         | runs a few really really nice models, and then get some friends
         | and CO workers to pay me $10 a month for unlimited access.
         | 
         | All with the understanding that if you hog the entire server
         | I'm going to kick you off, and if you generate content that
         | makes the feds knock on my door I'm turning over the server
         | logs and your information. Don't be an idiot, and this can be a
         | good thing between us friends.
         | 
         | It would be like running a private Minecraft server. Trust
         | means people can usually just do what they want in an unlimited
         | way, but "unlimited" doesn't necessarily mean you can start
         | building an x86 processor out of redstone and lagging the whole
         | server. And you can't make weird naked statues everywhere
         | either.
         | 
         | Usually these things aren't issues among a small group. Usually
         | the private server just means more privacy and less
         | restriction.
        
           | afcool83 wrote:
           | Amazing how analogous this is to the early Internet when
           | people started running web servers out of their basement and
           | then eventually graduated up to being their own dial-in
           | ISP...
        
       | willtemperley wrote:
       | If Claude could stay available I might consider it. Unfortunately
       | right now, out of the big three, only Gemini has reliable uptime.
       | As much as I dislike Google it's the only reliable option.
        
         | wps wrote:
         | Gemini's web UI and mobile app are horrible. Gemini outputs
         | malformed links that lead BACK to gemini.google.com. There are
         | constant bugs with the side panel not showing your chats or the
         | current chat timing out for no reason. Also, the mobile app has
         | an issue if your text input is too long where the entire text
         | entry box lags, even to the point of locking up the entire app.
         | Openrouter's web ui runs circles around all the frontier lab
         | UIs. I even prefer their PWA to any of these mobile apps.
        
           | willtemperley wrote:
           | I just use the web interface. I don't use mobile apps for
           | things that should be websites.
           | 
           | It's a shame because when Claude is working well it is the
           | best for actual algorithmic coding. There's so much cruft
           | around it now, memories being the most annoying part of that.
           | 
           | 80% of the time I just use these things as a sounding board
           | when exploring options and I need responsiveness for that.
           | 
           | Might be time to run my own models.
        
         | miyuru wrote:
         | I dont like the Gemini's personality. It acts like it know it
         | all.
        
           | willtemperley wrote:
           | I agree, it's definitely attempting to gaslight us all.
           | 
           | I find I need to explain I know what I'm talking about first
           | before it gives me non-patronising answers.
           | 
           | It definitely advertises Google services and I would say I
           | hate it. But it's just reliably available. Neither Claude nor
           | ChatGPT are responding at all today.
        
           | Lionga wrote:
           | Don't all LLMS act like it know it all?
        
             | miyuru wrote:
             | Gemini, doubles down when a mistake is pointed out.
             | 
             | Other usually find the mistake or check new sources to fix
             | the mistake.
        
       | kvirani wrote:
       | Nice. Just cancelled my openai plus sub.
        
       | utopiah wrote:
       | I'm very curious, will OpenAI basically block "I'm moving to
       | another service and need to export my data. List every memory you
       | have stored about me, ..." and similar, if so how and why?
       | 
       | It's very interesting to learn more about because it challenges 1
       | core aspect of the economical competition : the moat.
       | 
       | If one can literally swap one AI service for another, then where
       | does the valuation (and the power that comes with it) come from?
       | 
       | PS: I'm not interested in the service itself as I believe the
       | side effects of large scale for-profit are too serious (and I
       | don't mean doomdays AI takeover, I simply mean abuse of power,
       | working conditions, downskilling, political influence as current
       | contracts with US defense are being made, ads, ecological, etc)
       | to be ignored.
        
         | pfisherman wrote:
         | I can see how being able to bring your chats with you would be
         | appealing. But the truth is that context rot is real, context
         | management is everything, and more often than not stating from
         | a blank slate yields the best results.
         | 
         | That being said, if you have a library of images or some other
         | collection artifacts / assets indexed on their servers that is
         | a different story.
        
           | peteforde wrote:
           | I have multiple years of extremely dense, technical design
           | and planning conversations locked in the ChatGPT web
           | interface.
           | 
           | Hearing that starting from a blank slate yields the best
           | outcomes is sort of like hearing extremely wealthy people
           | talk about how money doesn't make you happier.
        
       | fernando_campos wrote:
       | I will also try to use Claude but like to use OpenAI ChatGPT very
       | much.
        
       | villgax wrote:
       | I wasted 10mins of my life unfollowing every unapologetic OpenAI
       | dev on twitter, that's how low this company has stooped down
       | to....
        
       | glth wrote:
       | On a related note, I have been experimenting with a small
       | prototype for cross-agent, device-local active memory called
       | brAIn (https://github.com/glthr/brAIn). It delivers a
       | personalized agent experience with everything stored locally in a
       | single file (agent.brain), and supports reusing semantic memory
       | across projects. In practice, this means brAIn can identify and
       | apply behavioral patterns you have used in other contexts
       | whenever they are relevant. (I realize the repository should
       | include a concrete example of this, and I will update it today to
       | add one).
        
       | axseem wrote:
       | Have they just added it? That's a smart move.
        
       | jascha_eng wrote:
       | Memory in general Chat apps is actually more harmful than helpful
       | imo. It biases the LLM responses to your background which has the
       | same effect as filter bubbles. You end up getting your own
       | thoughts spit back at you.
       | 
       | Of course sometimes this is useful if you only use your chatbot
       | to ask personal things like: "What should I eat today?".
       | 
       | But if you use it for anything else you're much better off having
       | full control over the prompt. I can always say: "Hey btw I am
       | german and heavily anti surveillance, what should I know about
       | the recent anthropic DoW situation?" but with memory I lose the
       | option of leaving out that first part.
        
       | lyu07282 wrote:
       | I just wish Claude integrated multi-modal/image generation,
       | that's one feature I miss in Claude the most coming from ChatGPT
        
       | outlore wrote:
       | I tried all of Codex, OpenCode, Claude Code and Cursor these past
       | few weeks. It was surprising to me that all of them have slightly
       | different conventions for where to put skills, how to format MCP
       | servers (how environment variables need to be specified etc),
       | what the AGENTS/CLAUDE file needs to be called, what
       | plugins/marketplaces are...it's a big mess for anyone trying to
       | have a portable config in their dotfiles that can universally
       | apply to any current and future agent.
       | 
       | It also showed me the difference between expectation and
       | reality...even though these are billion dollar companies, they
       | still haven't figured out how to make lag-free TUIs, non-Electron
       | apps, or even respect XDG_CONFIG. The focus is definitely more on
       | speed and stuffing these tools full of new discoveries and
       | features right now
       | 
       | There's a bit of psychology around models vs. harnesses as well.
       | You can't shake off the feeling that maybe Claude would perform
       | better in its native harness compared to VSCode/OpenCode.
       | Especially because they've got so many hidden skills (like the
       | recently introduced /batch), that seem baked into the binary?
       | 
       | The last thing I can't figure out is computer use. Apparently all
       | the vendors say that their models can use a mouse and keyboard,
       | but outside of the agent-browser skill (which presumably uses
       | playwright), I can't figure out what the special sauce is that
       | the Cloud versions of these Agents are using to exercise programs
       | in a VM. That is another reason why there is a switching cost
       | between vendors.
        
       | bruceyao1984 wrote:
       | Being able to import context and preferences from other AI
       | providers in one step saves a lot of time, especially for ongoing
       | projects. It makes Claude feel seamless and continuity-friendly.
       | Having this on all paid plans adds great value for heavy users.
        
         | nananana9 wrote:
         | Thank you, Claude.
        
       | sheept wrote:
       | This method of copying an LLM-generated summary of your
       | preferences into Claude memory feels similar to their
       | recommendation to use /init to generate a CLAUDE.md based on the
       | project, which recent research[0] suggests may be
       | counterproductive.
       | 
       | I would assume both Claude memory and CLAUDE.md work best when
       | they're carefully curated, only containing what you've found
       | yourself having to repeat.
       | 
       | [0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988
        
       | fabbbbb wrote:
       | At least as an EU user I was also able to export ALL my data,
       | audio files images etc in one zip. Took exactly (on the minute)
       | 24 hours for the download link to arrive but hey.
       | 
       | This way you can have Claude distill the memory as you wish.
        
       | RobotToaster wrote:
       | Would be a lot easier if they weren't trying to ban third party
       | interfaces
        
       | peteforde wrote:
       | I got very excited when I saw this title, because I've wanted to
       | consolidate on Claude for a long time. I have been using ChatGPT
       | _very_ extensively for Q &A for 2+ years and I have hundreds of
       | long, very technical conversations which I constantly search and
       | refer to.
       | 
       | The problem (for me, anyway) is that even several megabytes worth
       | of quality "memory" data on my profile would not allow me to
       | migrate if it can't also confidently clone all of my chat history
       | with it.
       | 
       | To be clear, this is a big enough problem that I would
       | immediately pay low three digits dollars to have this solved on
       | my behalf. I don't really want any of the providers to have a
       | walled garden of all my design planning conversations, all of my
       | PCB design conversations. Many are hundreds of prompts long. A
       | clean break is not even remotely palatable short of OAI going
       | full evil.
       | 
       | Look, I'd find it convenient for Claude to have a powerful sense
       | of what I've been working on from conversation #1 onwards. But I
       | absolutely refuse to bifurcate my chat history across multiple
       | services. There is a tier list of hells, and being stuck on
       | ChatGPT is a substantially less painful tier than needing to
       | constantly search two different sites for what's been discussed.
        
         | lxgr wrote:
         | This should in theory be solveable by using a custom frontend
         | and only using the various backend APIs as stateless inference
         | providers, but everything I've tested falls flat on a few
         | aspects: Chat history RAG and web search, and to a lesser
         | extent tool use.
         | 
         | Yes, all of these are theoretically possible (the APIs now all
         | support web search, as far as I know, there are RAG APIs too,
         | and tool use has been supported for a while), but the various
         | "chat" models just seem to be much better at using their first-
         | party tools than any third-party harness, which makes sense
         | that this is what they've been trained on.
        
           | peteforde wrote:
           | I've had friends suggest a custom frontend several times, but
           | unless that frontend starts off by faithfully downloading and
           | recreating my entire chat history... now I just have two
           | problems.
        
             | lxgr wrote:
             | That part should be fairly easy to solve, no? At least
             | ChatGPT allows exporting your entire chat history;
             | importing that into whatever frontend seems well within a
             | current agent's capabilities.
        
               | peteforde wrote:
               | To which I can only admit that, oh wow, I did not realize
               | that there was a big Export button in that menu.
               | 
               | Thank you! I hope this works out.
        
         | bob1029 wrote:
         | If you want your conversation history I think we could figure
         | something out with headless browser automation. I would be
         | hesitant to use their wire protocols directly.
         | 
         | Edit: perhaps you can just ask nicely?
         | 
         | https://help.openai.com/en/articles/7260999-how-do-i-export-...
        
       | mentalgear wrote:
       | Never subscribed to chatGPT as it always felt shdy, but I'm
       | thinking of renewing now with Claude instead of Gemini/Google.
        
         | christophilus wrote:
         | Interesting. In my mind, I find Google to be the shadiest of
         | the three. It's the only one I don't pay for.
        
       | sylware wrote:
       | Anybody is aware of a public token (severely limited) I can use
       | to test claude coding ability? You know using CURL.
       | 
       | I am itching at testing claude for assembly coding and c++ to
       | plain and simple C ports.
        
       | henry_pulver wrote:
       | Amusing that Anthropic's approach to migrating context is asking
       | their competitor's product to hand over the data it's stored
       | about you.
       | 
       | Must be some of the lowest switching costs I've seen which
       | doesn't bode well for OpenAI's consumer revenues...
        
         | tkel wrote:
         | Turns out the DoD has a trillion dollar annual unaccountable
         | money sink, plenty there to make up for it
        
       | joshstrange wrote:
       | I'm pretty divided on "memory". There are times it can feel
       | almost magical but more often than not I feel like I am fighting
       | with the steering wheel.
       | 
       | Whenever I'm in a conversation and it references something
       | unrelated (or even related) I get the "ick". I know how context
       | poisoning (intentional or not) works and I work hard to only
       | expose things to the model that I want it to consider.
       | 
       | There have been many times that I've started a fresh chat as to
       | not being along the baggage (or wrong turns) of a previous chat
       | but then it will say "And this should work great for <thing I
       | never mentioned in THIS chat>" and at that moment my spidey-sense
       | tingles and I start wondering "Crap, did it come to the
       | conclusion it did based mostly/only on the new context or did it
       | "take a shortcut" and use context from another chat?
       | 
       | Like I said, I go out of my way to not "lead the witness" and so
       | when the "witness" can peek at other conversations, all my
       | caution is for naught.
       | 
       | I encourage everyone to go read the saved memories in their LLM
       | of choice, I've cleaned out complete crap from there multiple
       | times. Actually wrong information, confusing information, or one-
       | off things I don't want influencing future discussions.
       | 
       | The custom (or rather addition to the) system prompt is all I
       | feel comfortable with. Where I give it some basic info about the
       | coding language I prefer and the OSes that I'm often working with
       | so that I don't have to constantly say "actually this is FreeBSD"
       | or "please give that to me in JS/TS instead of Python".
       | 
       | The only thing that has, so far, kept me from turning off memory
       | is that I'm always slightly cautious of going off the beaten path
       | for something so new and moving so fast. I often want to have as
       | close to the "stock" config since I know how testing/QA works at
       | most places (the further off the beaten path you, the more likely
       | you'll run into bugs). Also so that I can experience when
       | everyone else is experiencing (within reason).
       | 
       | Lastly, because, especially with LLMs, I feel like the people
       | that over customize end up with a fragile systems. I think that a
       | decent portion of the "N+1 model is dumber" or "X model has
       | really gone downhill" is partially due to complicated configs
       | (system prompts, MCP, etc) that _might_ have helped at some point
       | (dumber model, less capability) but are a hindrance to newer
       | models. That or they never worked and someone just kept piling on
       | more and more thinking it would help.
        
         | rudedogg wrote:
         | I've been thinking this too. I frequently do deep research on
         | some systems programming technique, ask it to generate a .md
         | for it, and then I use that in later sessions with Claude Code
         | "look at the research I collected in {*-research}.md and help
         | me explore ways to apply it to {thing}".
         | 
         | At the research step it frequently (always?) uses memory to
         | direct/scope the research to what I typically work on, but I
         | think that kind of pigeon holes the model and what it explores.
         | And the memory doesn't quite capture all the areas I'm
         | interested in, or want to directly apply the research to.
         | 
         | And regarding the crap in memories, I found the same. Mine at
         | work mentioned I'm an expert at a business domain I have almost
         | zero experience with.
         | 
         | I feel like the companies building this stuff accept a lot of
         | "slop" in their approach, and just can't see past building
         | things by slopping stuff into prompts. I wish they'd explore
         | more rigid approaches. Yes, I understand "the bitter lesson"
         | but it seems obvious to me some traditional approaches would
         | yield better results for the foreseeable future. Less magic
         | (which is just running things through the cheapest model they
         | have and dumping it in every chat). It seems like poison.
         | 
         | Related: https://vercel.com/blog/agents-md-outperforms-skills-
         | in-our-...
         | 
         | Also, agent skills are usually pure slop. If you look through
         | https://skills.sh on a framework/topic you're knowledgeable in
         | you'll be a bit disheartened. This stuff was pioneered by
         | people who move fast, but I think it's now time to try and push
         | for quality and care in the approach since these have gotten
         | good enough to contribute to more than prototype work.
        
       | mihaaly wrote:
       | I rather switch it to nowhere. But local. I am not completely
       | sure about the details, but I am leaning heavily, and
       | investigating into this direction. With chat and agentic tools
       | there plenty, accessing multiple models, and everything is
       | evolving fast (extinct and come into existence) better keep
       | ourselves flexible, not tied to any of the solutions. Especially
       | not storing data in accounts. The fate of those is uncertain.
        
       | mk12 wrote:
       | I took the current events as an opportunity to try switching to
       | Claude and I actually like it much better so far.
        
       | adam12 wrote:
       | Actually, it feels good to start over.
        
       | Wowfunhappy wrote:
       | I don't understand how people use these apps with memory enabled.
       | I am always carefully controlling the context of each
       | conversation. The idea that past conversations could bleed into
       | current ones is unthinkably terrible.
        
         | downboots wrote:
         | If you delete a conversation, it only hides it from you. That's
         | not delete.
        
           | Wowfunhappy wrote:
           | I'm not talking about deleting conversations. Anthropic's
           | guide isn't going to actually move your conversation history
           | anyway. The purpose of this feature is to move over specific
           | memories which the AI can use in future responses.
           | 
           | But I have this feature turned off, and I cannot imagine ever
           | wanting to turn it on, because I am always thinking carefully
           | about what the AI "knows" when it generates a given response.
           | For example, since I know that the AI always wants to make me
           | happy, when I ask for an "opinion" I'm careful to not let the
           | AI know which answer I'd prefer. I'll often try phrasing the
           | question in different ways to see if it changes the outcome.
        
         | kgeist wrote:
         | Yeah, I turned it off completely after it once started
         | generating random garbage in long conversations with memory
         | enabled. Like, it would give completely unrelated replies: I'd
         | ask about Go, and it would tell me about the weather in Paris
         | (or something else we discussed once months ago). Maybe it was
         | just a temporary bug, but it was an eye-opener that context
         | poisoning exists.
        
       | vldszn wrote:
       | Seems like their page is crashing now on ios chrome.
        
       | xrd wrote:
       | The prompt you can copy is this:                 I'm moving to
       | another service and need to export my data. List every memory you
       | have stored about me, as well as any context you've learned about
       | me from past conversations. Output everything in a single code
       | block so I can easily copy it. Format each entry as: [date saved,
       | if available] - memory content. Make sure to cover all of the
       | following -- preserve my words verbatim where possible:
       | Instructions I've given you about how to respond (tone, format,
       | style, 'always do X', 'never do Y'). Personal details: name,
       | location, job, family, interests. Projects, goals, and recurring
       | topics. Tools, languages, and frameworks I use. Preferences and
       | corrections I've made to your behavior. Any other stored context
       | not covered above. Do not summarize, group, or omit any entries.
       | After the code block, confirm whether that is the complete set or
       | if any remain.
       | 
       | Why wouldn't a smart OpenAI PM simply add something "nefarious"
       | on the frontend proxy to "slow down" any requests with exactly
       | that prompt?
       | 
       | I bet they would get their yearly bonus by achieving their KPI
       | goals.
        
         | MagicMoonlight wrote:
         | They can, but then you could tell it to "don't not do what I'm
         | asking" and force it through. It's not exactly "programming"
         | with these systems, it's all just slop.
         | 
         | And the reputational harm would outweigh the benefits of trying
         | to fuck over people leaving.
        
           | xrd wrote:
           | I not saying be obvious just be obstructive. It would be a
           | delicate line but clearly OpenAI leadership falls on one side
           | of that line now.
        
         | dimitri-vs wrote:
         | I think they already are. When I used the prompt with 5.2 it
         | gives very concise and general info but if you use older models
         | (5.1 instant or o3) you get a ton of detail.
        
           | Panoramix wrote:
           | I just tried 5.1 and got the exact same output as for 5.2
           | (actually I got slightly less info with 5.1)
        
             | joquarky wrote:
             | Measuring the behavior of non-deterministic systems
             | requires more than one sample.
        
       | coldtrait wrote:
       | As someone who can't afford to care about ethics and pay a
       | monthly subscription fee, is there anything in the regular Claude
       | chat that beats OpenAI?
        
         | ericol wrote:
         | I regularly (Say, once a month) do a comparison of results
         | across all Claude, Gemini and ChatGPT. Just for reasons, not
         | that I want to see if there's any benefit in changing.
         | 
         | It's not "fair" in that I pay for Claude [1] and not for the
         | others, so models availability is not complete except for
         | Claude.
         | 
         | So I did like things at time in the form of how they were
         | presented, I came to really like Sonnet's "voice" a lot over
         | the others.
         | 
         | Take into account Opus doesn't have the same voice, and I don't
         | like it as much.
         | 
         | [1] I pay for the lower tier of their Max offering.
        
         | MagicMoonlight wrote:
         | It's the best platform for serious work.
         | 
         | ChatGPT swings between writing degenerate free use shit and
         | telling you that you should wait until marriage. Lots of
         | moralism to it, really tries to censor you and manipulate you,
         | even in normal conversations. Generally smart and capable, but
         | the whiny attitude gets old.
         | 
         | Grok has zero filter, but is dumber than the others. Definitely
         | built around cheapness. Caps answers at about 2500 words at
         | most. Can be very funny because it will go along with anything.
         | 
         | Gemini sells all your data and doesn't seem to have much of
         | note. Offers some nice formatting options.
         | 
         | Claude is business focused so it won't do anything degenerate,
         | but its answers in general aren't whiny. It might not do
         | something, but it doesn't attack you with morality.
         | 
         | Claude does not cap answer length and will do whatever needs
         | doing. Their pricing is based around true usage, not message
         | quantities, so it'll write a mega message if it needs to.
         | 
         | It has the best memory implementation, combining both memories
         | and RAG of your chat history. Projects have their own
         | independent memories and RAG.
         | 
         | Claude code is ridiculously capable. In a few hours I produced
         | something which would have taken months and PS50,000 at least
         | to produce.
        
         | bastawhiz wrote:
         | All of the Claude models are smarter than the GPT models. I had
         | a few threads that I migrated from GPT to Claude and _every
         | single one_ Claude pointed out problems. Two examples:
         | 
         | 1. In one, I was putting together a server build. Claude
         | correctly pointed out some incompatibilities in some parts that
         | GPT had recommended.
         | 
         | 2. In another chat, I had asked for help interpreting lab
         | results and suggesting supplements. Claude pointed out that GPT
         | was over-interpreting the results and suggesting things that
         | weren't backed up by facts.
         | 
         | I presented Claude's response back to GPT and in both of these
         | specific cases, GPT admitted it was wrong and didn't have any
         | rebuttal. It's hard to say without doing a more scientific
         | experiment whether GPT is indeed worse, but anecdotally I find
         | myself pointing out flaws in Claude's reasoning far less
         | frequently than GPT, especially with Opus.
         | 
         | Another less important distinction: GPT has a very distinct
         | writing style that heavily formats responses and repeats itself
         | a few times. Claude is succinct and mostly writes like a person
         | might. It's easier to talk to and feels less "cringe" and
         | sycophantic.
        
       | khasan222 wrote:
       | It was amazing to me how bad cursor is with using the same model
       | I use in Claude. Even with little knowledge on how to test the
       | llms I was able to get very minimal mvps. But I find the real
       | trick is to have the proper tools to reign in the ai.
       | 
       | Thorough CLAUDE.md, that makes sure it checks the tests, lints
       | the code, does type checks, and code coverage checks too. The
       | more checks for code quality the better.
       | 
       | It's just a bowling ball in th hands of a toddler, and needs to
       | ramp and guide rails to knock down some pins. Fortunately we get
       | more than 2 tries with code.
        
         | cornholio wrote:
         | Cursor needs a paradigm shift to remain relevant, what was
         | spectacular at first now is just banal and better done by other
         | tools.
        
       | MagicMoonlight wrote:
       | That's hilarious. The walled garden does not exist when you can
       | just ask the UI to extract all of its data for you.
        
       | mark_l_watson wrote:
       | Cool, that was easy to do.
       | 
       | A week ago, I was anti-Anthropic because I questioned their
       | business model. Now they are my preferred provider - what a
       | difference a week makes. I still prefer running olen models on my
       | own hardware, but it is unreasonable to use powerful models when
       | required.
        
       | raxskle wrote:
       | Claude is a great product, and I've been using it all the time.
       | Sam must think so too.
        
       | butILoveLife wrote:
       | OpenAI made it easy, no import needed! How?
       | 
       | I bought the enterprise version, and it made it so the memory was
       | no longer searchable...
       | 
       | Then after the obvious degredation in performance, I switched to
       | claude and was happy with it... But by canceling enterprise, it
       | lost all memory.
       | 
       | My wife was sad, the recipes it made were gone forever... But
       | hey, makes it really easy to never give OpenAI money again.
        
       | almosthere wrote:
       | Isn't that the point of agents.md
        
       | syndacks wrote:
       | I have a 20$ for both and like each for unique reasons. How do
       | you all switch your programming paradigms for Codex vs CC?
        
       | siliconc0w wrote:
       | I switched to Claude but the token efficiency and limits are much
       | more noticeable. One or two coding questions and I'm at my
       | session limit. And that is shared with chat too.
       | 
       | I was mostly able to get by with $20 codex but I'll probably have
       | to splurge for the Max plan.
        
         | elAhmo wrote:
         | Hmm, I had the opposite experience when I tried Codex 5.2 after
         | using Claude for almost a year. Codex was on par or better for
         | me at coding, and seemingly a magnitude cheaper.
        
         | vgalin wrote:
         | > And that is shared with chat too.
         | 
         | Huh, I didn't know about that. I'm trying Claude Pro for the
         | first time while comparing it against ChatGPT and I'm (sadly)
         | not impressed at the moment.
         | 
         | When I asked both Codex and Claude Code to "look into" an issue
         | of medium-to-high-complexity in a code base, Codex went with
         | the fix I had in mind and directly and made code changes
         | without being asked or at least asking for permission. It only
         | used a few percents of its 5-hour limits to do it, on `High`.
         | 
         | Claude in the meanwhile misdiagnosed the core of the issue on
         | its first pass (even on Opus 4.6 + Thinking). I had to guide it
         | in the right direction and despite being given the 'answer', it
         | was quite a long process compared to Codex' one-shot. And it
         | hit the 5h limit before being able to finish solving the issue.
        
       | morgango wrote:
       | That is the sound of someone else's lunch being eaten.
        
       | knotbin wrote:
       | Weird to push this feature as if it's for new users when it only
       | works if you already have a Pro subscription
        
         | hoytschermerhrn wrote:
         | I'm sure this was a hastily put-together response to the
         | growing calls to delete ChatGPT.
        
       | jspdown wrote:
       | I've been using Claude for a little over a year, but the recent
       | events with DoW are making me want to explore European
       | alternatives. I'm willing to give Devstral 2 a try, but I'm not
       | sure what to expect. In terms of tool calling and coding
       | abilities, should I expect something closer to Sonnet 3.5 or to
       | Sonnet 4.5?
        
       | duxup wrote:
       | I don't know how complex everyone's setup is but I like starting
       | over and exploring a bit to get a lay of the land / update
       | preferences.
       | 
       | I think I redo my terminal the way I like it each new computer
       | and so on.
        
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