alt Hacker NewsThe reason Claude code is so popular is because it’s really good at taking super vague human prose “Claude build me a million dollar SaaS”-type prompts and spitting out thousands of lines of code which cover tons of surface-level edge cases, build in tons of functionality, etc
The smaller/open models are less good at that. But that’s not how software development is done. You don’t prompt a whole app and be done with it. If you’re using it as an aid to traditional software dev, iterating on small, targeted functions, GLM works as good if not better than Claude. Anthropic expects low quality prompts. If you rubber duck GLM, you get absolutely pristine output in most cases.
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Frontier models like Opus 5 are also extremely good a "research" in an academic sense, including combining elements from different fields or literatures and creating something quite novel sometimes, publishable even, from vague/speculative prompts. This is on top of implementing known methods in about 1/100th of the time it would take by hand, allowing for fast exploration of ideas. They can also roll things out from scratch, removing essentially all third party dependencies from your code base, other than Numpy or Scipy. This really buys you a lot of clarity and/or performance sometimes.
This is what I've found and would likely be the consenses of the HN community.
This has lowered the barrier of entry for many non-SWEs. I'm primarily a data scientist myself in the environmental sector with limited front end development.
My partner proposed an idea to help manage her horses and over the course of several weeks we fleshed out an android app that would enable/assist her with horse care.
I spent a few days in planning mode pointing claude to the services we want to utilise and the functionality.
We now have a fully developed app that we are testing but found several features missing. For example, Claude implement X but without a level of verbosity it failed to implement the edit/deletion of X.
The app is highly tailored to her use case and I had already built the main parts as a POC but she had no user-friendly method to interact with the information she required. Claude made this possible in such a quick time frame that just seems insane. As someone time poor (as most horse people are), it would have taken me a year+ to produce something unpolished when compared to what Claude produced.
> The smaller/open models are less good at that. But that’s not how software development is done. You don’t prompt a whole app and be done with it.
After open models will also be able to do that, I expect everyone to forget "how software development is done".
Sorry to be pedantic, but I believe this is a major source of confusion: Claude "Code" is not a model.
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Personally I've found Deepseek v4 Flash to be as useful to me as Opus. But I don't do these silly one shot tech demos. I have the technical understanding to ask for exactly the change I want with the right terminology. I loaded up some credit on openrouter and it took me ages to hit $1 in spend.