alt Hacker NewsClaude Code accelerated this divide. Programmers using Claude Code realized that giving LLMs access to a terminal made them feel 100 times smarter. Access to Bash, CLIs, and the ability to visit websites without the many restrictions made them powerful.
Meanwhile, the average user was still using ChatGPT, which probably felt like it had plateaued over the last few releases. The real power of these models became apparent when paired with a terminal. Agents like Muse and OpenClaw are now attempting to bring that same Claude Code-like power to everyday users through a simple chat UI.
A terminal also tells the model when it failed. Exit code, stderr, a stack trace. it reads that and tries again.
The apps normal people use mostly don't. I spent two years building agents that worked inside people's gmail and calendar, and the failures that hurt all came back as 200 OK. - Slack puts {"ok": false} inside a 200. - Google ignores query params it doesn't recognise, so i sent max_results instead of maxResults for weeks and every filter was silently dropped.
The agent says "done", the user finds out later, and they stop trusting it. So i think part of the gap is that agents look a lot dumber when nothing tells them they got it wrong.