alt Hacker NewsWhy Developers Keep Choosing Claude over Every Other AI
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I've been using ChatGPT (Thinking). I like how it has learned how I do stuff, and keeps that in mind. Yesterday, I asked it to design an API, and it referenced a file I had sent in, for a different server, days earlier, in order to figure out what to do.
I'm not using it in the same way that many folks do. Maybe if I get to that point, I'll prefer Claude, but for my workflow, ChatGPT has been ideal.
I guess the best part, is that it seems to be the absolute best, at interpreting my requirements; including accounting for my human error.
There is also the very lame auto win category that i happen to fall into...
I dont trust openai, or google. google has beyond proven that they aren't trustworthy well before the LLM coding tool era. I am legitimately not even giving them a chance.
Sadly I am assuming anthropic will at some point lose my trust, but for now they just feel like the obvious choice for me.
So obviously i am a terrible overall observer, but i am sure i am not alone in the auto win portion of devs choosing anthropic.
Gemini is supposed to have this huge context; Gemini cli (paid) often forgets by the next prompt whatever the previous was about and starts doing something completely different , often switching natural or programming language. I use codex and with 5.3 it is better but not there compared to cc for us anyway; it just goes looking for stuff, draws the most bizarre conclusions and ends up lost quite often doing the wrong things. Mistral works quite well on smaller issues. Cerebras gml rocks on quick analysis; if it had more token allowance and less rate limiting , it would probably be what I would use all the time; unfortunately, on a large project, I hit a 24 hour block in less than an hour of coding. It does do a LOT in that time of course because of its bizarre speed.
I use Claude for a few reasons.
1) I don't want to give OpenAI my money. I don't like how they are spending so much money to shape politics to benefit them. That seems to fly in the face of this being a public benefit. If you have to spend money like that because you're afraid of what the public will do, what does that say?
2) I like how Claude just gives me straight text on one side, examples on the other, and nothing else. ChatGPT and Gemini tend to go overboard with tables, lists, emojis, etc. I can't stand it.
3) A lot of technical online conversation seems to have been hollowed out in recent years. The amount of people making blog posts explaining how to use something new has basically tanked.
Model aside, the harness of Claude Code is just a much better experience. Agent teams, liberal use of tasks and small other ergonomics make it a better dev tool for me.
> Half their agentic usage is coding. When that's your reality, you train for it. You optimize the tool use, the file editing, the multi-step workflows - because that's what your paying users are actually doing. Google doesn't have that same pressure.
I wonder if this is a strategic choice — anthropic has decided to go after the developers, a motivated but limited market. Whereas the general populace might be more attracted to improved search tools, allowing Google/openai/etc to capture that larger market
Could it be tooling like Claude Code? I just used Claude Code with qwen3.5:35b running locally to track down two obscure bugs in new Common Lisp code I wrote yesterday.
Claude the model or Claude (Code) the tool? I'm not sure what to think about an article that doesn't make it clear which one they are talking about...
I also have always gone back to Claude after trying new models... until GPT-5.3-Codex, specifically with the new Codex Mac app. I've been pretty much full time with it for a few weeks now and have not missed Claude Code. It can over complicate things at times, but for the most part, it is providing working solutions on first go and following coding patterns that already exist in my app. With Claude, it would frequently knock out a feature with acceptable code quality, but be completely broken and require a round of debugging.
I'm even getting by without hitting limits on the $20/month plan, whereas I needed to be on the $100/month one with Claude.
This resonates with my experience. At Morph we use gemini for well specified point coding tasks, and it does very well across millions of lines of code every day. We also use claude code as an engineering tool for our own codebase and it does better at being adaptive and for working on open ended issues.
I prefer ChatGPT because i can ask it to rewrite entire files with minimal changes in the chat (up to 3k lines) and it will do it.
Every other AI add random opinionated and unwanted stuff
This article is 100% AI generated. I confirmed with pangram.
All developers are in love with that wonderful Claude:
Mistral are quietly far better than all the noise would suggest.
I prefer Googles. I can only afford the free models. I normally copy and paste my stuff into 4-5 models and compare the responses. Its probably a waste of time, but very mentally satisfying. I mostly program as a form of mental stimulation instead of trying to become a billionaire. Taking this perspective, using AI agents is not really the same experience, and less mentally stimulating than programming.
I don't understand quite how Anthropic have managed to get so much mind share for Claude Code given the UX is pretty bad compared to something like Cursor.
Developers prefer Claude because that's their brand, a very intentional choice. If you have a very specific use in mind (like coding), you aren't going to go for the jack of all trades, master of none solution. You're going to go for the coding specialist, which Anthropic has squarely positioned themselves as. Props to them for it - they correctly predicted that LLMs can do many things, but perhaps the most valuable is coding as they're very well suited to it due to the rigidly defined syntax and high cost of engineers.
I started using Codex 5.3. Compare to Opus 4.6, it's more precise in pinning down bugs and more concise with code. Opus can be best described as distracted and easily agreeable. Codex actually digs deeper for root causes and push back when I'm wrong.
Dev, very happy with Gemini, especially flash
Googles AI products suck hard though
Does anyone know if using claude with opencode violate their new policies?
I am torn between Claude and GPT. Though it was recently brought to my attention that I use LLMs in an old-fashioned way [1]. I will say that based on my usages, both models seem very comparable in terms of accuracy and quality. Sometimes one might do things a bit different, but both tend to be more similar than different.
When I am using an LLM for JS, I can't really tell the difference between the two. For C#, I think GPT might produce slightly better quality code, but Claude produces code that seems more modern. I also feel like Claude makes slightly more minor mistakes like forgetting to negate a boolean conditional check.
With Swift, I have found both models to be surprisingly awful. I am not sure if it is because of some of the more recent changes with Swift versions greater than 6.0, but both seem to produce wild results for me.
[1] I do not use Codex CLI nor Claude Code nor any IDE plug-ins. I just type questions into the web app and rarely copy/paste anything back and forth.
At this point I completely stopped using anything else.
Even for vacation questions or psychotherapy, claude is the best, despite complaining about not receiving a coding task (sometimes).
Use to love Grok Code Fast 1 because it was free on GHCP. I gave it context but just let it churn on a solution. Claude is far better but a finite resource. I think OpenCode plus GPT-4o might be my next step.
Was it ever confirmed that Anthropic did paid astroturfing? Or is this organic?
I keep using Claude over other models (through Cursor) because the answers it gives and the plans it creates align with how I would personally approach the same problem if I were doing it myself. The other models /might/ produce a better final result as benchmarked/tested, but how they get there feels like complete nonsense to me.
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I don't think vibe coders know the difference, but often when I ask AI to add a feature to a large code base, I already know how I'd do it myself, and the answer that Claude comes up with is more often the one I would have done. Codex and Gemini have burned me too many times, and I keep going back to Claude. I trust it's judgement. Anthropic models have always been a step above OpenAI and Google, even 2 years ago it was like that so it must be something fundamental.