alt Hacker NewsWhat type of projects are you guys building? I bought Max and these features to try it out to build a more complex project (ROS2) and that does not seem to work out at all… HTML page, yes, embedded project not so much.
What type of projects are you guys building? I bought Max and these features to try it out to build a more complex project (ROS2) and that does not seem to work out at all… HTML page, yes, embedded project not so much.
With all the LLM coding assistants, you have to get a feel for each model and which extension/interface you're using with them. Not only that, but it's also dependent on your project!
For example, if you're writing a command line tool in Python, it doesn't really matter what model you use since they're all really great at Python (LOL). However, if you're writing a complicated SPA that uses say, Vue 3 with Vite (and some fancy CSS framework) and Python w/FastAPI... You want the "smartest" model that knows about all these things at once (and regularly gets updated knowledge of the latest versions of things). For me, that means Claude Code.
I am cheap though and only pay Anthropic $20/month. This means I run out of Claude Credits every damned week (haha). To work around this problem, I used to use OpenAI's pay-per-use API with gpt5-mini with VS Code's Copilot extension, switching to GPT5-codex (medium) with the Codex extension for more complicated tasks.
Now that I've got more experience, I've figured out that GPT5-codex costs way too much (in API credits) for what you get in nearly all situations. Seriously: Why TF does it use that much "usage". Anyway...
I've tried them all with my very, very complicated collaborative editor (CRDTs), specifically to learn how to better use AI coding assistants. So here's what I do now:
I cannot understate how impressed I am with gpt-oss:120b... It's like 10x faster than gpt5-mini and yet seems to perform just as well. Maybe better, actually because it forces you to narrow your prompts (due to smaller context window). But because it's just so damned fast, that doesn't matter.With Claude Code, it's like magic: You give it a really f'ing complicated thing to troubleshoot or implement and it just goes—and keeps going until it finishes or you run out of tokens! It's a, "the future is now!" experience for sure.
With gpt-oss:120b it's more like having an actual conversation, where the only time you stop typing is when you're reviewing what it did (which you have to do for all the models... Some more than others).
FYI: The worst is Gemini 2.5. I wouldn't even bother! It's such trash, I can't even fathom how Google is trying to pass it off as anything more than a toy. When it decides to actually run (as opposed to responding with, "Failed... Try again"), it'll either hallucinate things that have absolutely nothing to do with your prompt or it'll behave like some petulant middle school kid that pretend to spend a lot of time thinking about something but ultimately does nothing at all.