I never want to hear from developers again that they are not susceptible to marketing. I see meet ups specifically about Claude often.
Modern tupperware party.
A colleague was convinced Claude is better so we played a game. We used the claude code and codex harness and I implemented some prs they needed with gpt5.5 and opus4.7 and asked them to identify which came from which only from the code.
Couldn’t tell.
Edit: i bet 99% of people here, if presented with a test where i gave 5 models but all of the results came from one, would not be able to discern this. Just vibes all the way down.
Ah that's always SO fun. It doesn't matter how "smart" the person actually are (or think they are) we are ALL susceptible to influence and blind tests are shockingly simple to implement.
Convinced you can distinguish A from B? Ok! No problem, let's try! Can be at the dinner table for fancy wine or with agents, it's all the same, you try an option, another option, maybe all options from the same, and if you reliably can't tell well kudos, you are just like the rest of us!
It's easy to "know" in retrospect but blind test is where genuine difference can be found. Or not.
It’s also true in every other realm. Governments, think tanks, political parties, and activist groups use propaganda because it works.
I sometimes wonder how much of what I believe is bullshit I was fed through intentional propaganda. I do think as I’ve gotten older I’ve gradually identified and challenged some of it.
I can’t tell the difference between code written in vim or vs code but it matters substantially to the person writing the code. There’s stuff beyond just the output that goes into tool choice.
Your argument is fine but different from the claim the OP is making. You cannot simply make a claim that (model + harness) X is better than Y, but then have no discernible difference in the output. Subjectively, people might still prefer one over due to anything from design to marketing, but that's very different from the claim that X is better than Y for coding (see: "A colleague was convinced Claude is better"). Basically, I prefer Claude is a different claim than Claude is better and the latter has a higher bar of proof.
> You cannot simply make a claim that (model + harness) X is better than Y, but then have no discernible difference in the output.
You definitely can in principle; that’s the entire point of the comment you are responding to. If one tool completes it in 10 minutes with little hand holding, and the other does it in one hour at 4× the cost and while needing a lot of steering, the former is arguably better even if the end result is the same.
Whether that’s specifically true and demonstrable of GPT and Claude is another question, but your blanket statement doesn’t hold as a general rule.
That's a fair callout and I agree my statement was too general in just mentioning 'output', as you correctly pointed out. To define 'better' you would indeed need to agree on the dimensions you would evaluate candidates against.
I think a more appropriate rephrasing would be 'You cannot simply make a claim that (model + harness) X is better than Y, but then have no discernible difference on dimensions you care about'. In the case of latest of claude code vs codex with gpt 5.5) both are similar enough in the dimensions people will care about in evaluating (vs. differing wildly in cost or time taken).
I'd bet I could tell with a result somewhat better than random chance.
While there is no meaningful difference in the ability to write code, vim has earned it's reputation for having a learning curve. I'd argue that predisposition, that requirement for additional investment energy will bias the results towards attention to detail, and pure minimalism.
I don't think it's only marketing. OpenAI had the advantage of being first to the market, and in the beginning of the race it seemed that the future belongs to them. Then came the bad PR and unpredictable quality of their main product.
For general use, ChatGPT's answers have gotten worse over the last year. I abandoned it.
This is like saying you gave a Taylor Swift fan sheet music from 1984 and from Michael Jackson’s thriller and they couldn’t tell the difference.
I have a strong affinity for Claude Code because of the interaction experience and overall tone / vibe / process. I am 100% willing to believe the code it produces is identical or possibly less good than Codex.
I enjoy working with Claude in a way I just don’t get from OpenAI. YMMV, you may feel just the opposite. But it’s a mistake to look at the produced code as the only dimension of these products.
The creative output and time to direct, to deliver due to the flow will also be different.
And it really depends on the task. Is it a typical well defined bug, or is it simpel CRUD. Or does it require research, combining different sources of data in a complex and creative ways.
This is also why benches never show reality, and the only real understanding comes if you actually try to build something.
That's a weird way to look at it. Any car gets you to your destination, but some people prefer driving a sports car or an SUV. They get something out of it that isn't just a marketing delusion, but subjective joy from the interaction with one product over another.
Luxury cars are indeed a good comparison. The subjective joy is a result of the delusion. That is why so much money is spent on such marketing to begin with. The analogous comparison would be if a blindfolded passenger turned out to prefer the Sienna to the 911.
I would actually say it is a luxury car where you have your personal driver and you are free to work on other tasks, and it gets you faster to the destination. Time to me is at least the most valuable thing.
I think for developers the distinction is that ChatGPT is this commercial all in one solution for normies and Claude is specific for developers, in reality as you say the results for normal developers is indistinguishable.
I don't think that's the only reason but you're spot on about OpenAI marketing being absolutely terrible. The primary product names of "Claude" vs "ChatGPT" highlights this remarkable difference. To the point where I'm seeing Claude completely take over the generic term for agent.
I do think OpenAI is doomed due to bad leadership. What you said (that the marketing is relatively terrible) and what others are saying here (that the product is worse) is damning isn't it? Are they really failing on all fronts?
It's crazy hearing devs on this site claim Claude is 10x better than all other AI solutions. I think it is fomo. Claude $LATEST_VERSION is perceived as the best and anything else is "missing out". New version comes out? Suddenly the old version is worthless, how on earth did anyone get work done with that?
Same reason people buy the RTX 4090 and 5090 cards - overpriced but they must have the "best". Never mind the diminishing returns trying to max out PC settings (3-4x performance hit for an almost imperceptible increase in graphics, ignoring DLSS) - it's the psychological cost of having to move a slider down a notch.
I've been using Google and now DeepSeek v4 and I am having absolutely no problems and it's a fraction of the cost. I'd love for Claude to be 10x better but it just isn't, for my use case anyway.
Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 are the best models, but people don't care about "best" anymore, until there is a big leap in capability I don't think anyone will care about point releases.
I’ve been using DeepSeek V4 in OpenCode exclusively for about a month.
I think it’s great, but coming from Claude Code it did feel like going back in time by ~6 months in model capabilities. This isn’t a big deal to me for what I do, but the difference is definitely there.
Deepseek v4 Pro is like Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2, but costs pennies on the pound for API. Which is to say, I should definitely be using it more to let my Codex and Claude subs go further.
Opus 4.5 was definitely stronger than DeepSeek V4 for me, specifically with large context.
I’m being pedantic/splitting hairs, though. I’ve obviously switched to DeepSeek full-time because it makes more sense to me pragmatically — I spend a few more tokens to get the outcome I want, but the tokens are cheap as dirt and the API is faster.
Perhaps I should plug it into Claude Code and see how it performs? I haven’t tried that.
I don't think it's marketing, for quite a long time Claude was clearly better and not everyone has adapted to the new reality where they have similar capabilities.
I was really frustrated by GPT-5.4, but last night I really pulled out the stops and within a few hours I got path tracing and DLSS implemented on top of Godot, which doesn’t even support DLSS. Just to see if it could do it? And you know what, it did, which was absolutely mind blowing. It wrote like 5,000 lines of C++, I set up a mostly local asset production pipeline using GPT image gen, voiceovers using ElevenLabs API, and even background music using Suno via the chrome use extensions in Codex. I just wanted to see how far I could push this little dumb game my kids asked me to make, and my kids are like “wow our game looks so good!” These models are absolutely mind blowing. I didn’t want to go to sleep I was having so much fun.
Calling this a "tupper ware" seems a bit emotional, you're intentionally disregarding many things that matter for devs in order to try to claim equivalence, rather than paying attention to the actual process of software creation.
For example in your "test" you're only looking at output and ignoring the entire process of creation.
In addition to that process, you're ignoring that Claude Code was first and better for a long time, why would people switch for something that produces the same output? Claude Code has been way ahead in the process of agentic software creation for a long time, I still prefer its features. Even though I think that Opus 4.7 was a big step backwards, and I've been getting worse results seemingly every day with the churn of features at Claude Code, some of that may also be me testing the bounds of how little I can specify and still get acceptable results, so it's hard to know.
Calling all these concrete realities "marketing" is itself you trying to market Codex as "good enough" instead of paying attention to how we got where we are and where we will go in the future.
No, Tupperware is the exact analogy. As you point out though, the multi level marketing applies to all models. Anthropic is just the most aggressive, especially here.
Software developers are the most susceptible of all population groups for amplifying their employers' new whims. There are true believers and useful idiots, but many are just mediocre and know that playing along will further their career for a couple of years.
a) everyone is "susceptible" to marketing - so what
b) therefore a preference for Claude is marketing - complete bollocks
Either the tasks you chose were well below the capabilities of top models, or meaningful differences for preference are elsewhere, or both.
Your comment is probably energy-efficient and sustainable, however, because you could use it again and again when another comparison comes up, like Vim vs Emacs, or tea vs coffee
I use both, enough to reach Codex highest personal sub limits and Claude is stronger to me specifically because of how the flow of building feels. So the PR for any random task would be irrelevant to me.
Pretty easy to tell depending what the code is. GPT follows this pattern is using maybe_something and using uppercase constants by default. Claude is a little more natural but tends to include more fallbacks than gpt5.5
I have always found this field, especially in the last 10-15 years, to be incredibly fad driven to the point that it reminds me of things like fashion more than an engineering field.
It’s one of the things I don’t like about it. All humans are susceptible to herd behavior and influence but engineers should be at least a bit more hard nosed and reason more from first principles.
You're comparing apples to oranges. Claude is a frontend overall product name, GPT5.5 is a specific model. Which model within Claude's offerings are you referring to? Opus 4.7, Sonnet 4.6, or something else?
Last year I used a bunch of models to try to generate Rust code. They all sucked.
This February I tried again and used Claude to generate Rust code. I have never been more stunned in my life. It's just as good as I am, and 30x faster. No fluff, the code is verbatim just as I would have written.
I then tried other models. Total disappointment.
I've continued to repeat this experiment. Opus is the only model that can write Rust reasonably.
Codex produces junk to this day. It passes variables that aren't needed, it abuses pointers, it creates overly verbose monstrosities...
I don't want any single company to win. I want OpenAI to be competitive. I want open source models to win. But right now, Claude Code and Opus are it.
> This February I tried again and used Claude to generate Rust code. I have never been more stunned in my life. It's just as good as I am, and 30x faster. No fluff, the code is verbatim just as I would have written.
Having looked at a bunch of known or suspected (based on the intent of the code and/or what I know about the developer(s)) LLM generated rust, there's only a few explanations here:
1. You're way better at prompting than (virtually) anyone else.
2. You're vastly overestimating how good the rust code it produced is.
3. You handheld the model throughout and made lots of edits.
4. Your hand written rust code is very bad.
Because from every example I've seen, these models write horrible rust. Sure, it may technically pass all the tests, but it's horribly pessimized, badly organized, doesn't even attempt to use the type system, if there aren't bugs now there will be the second it tries to refactor or add a new feature, etc. etc.
(I also strongly suspect that the same would be true for other languages, but I can detect it in rust more easily because it's my main language)
I recently tried with C# code and Avalonia on Linux. Total disaster. Could only get things to run after 10 attempts or so, and was only trying a very basic example. For some of the experiments I actually gave up.
Same. But even worse than all that: OAI erased Anthropic's red lines with the DOW, making it socially acceptable for every other AI company to do the same, creating a "race to the bottom."
I think OAI actually legitimately increased p(doom) for us all. Very strange behavior for a company that is supposedly concerned about x-risk.
Sam Altman is so cartoonishly, over-the-top sociopathically shady that he makes JD Vance look like Benjamin Franklin. I mean, honestly, tricking third world people into retinal scans in order to get a scam crypto coin? Anyone using OpenAI for anything at this point should pause and examine their ethical compass.
Claude has an "End Conversation" tool that it can trigger on it's own, forcing your interaction to a close based on it's own feelings towards the conversation.
I have no idea how this wasn't the end of Anthropic's positive public perception.
I think Sam Altman is an asshole and I prefer to spend my money elsewhere.
Frontier models being commoditize is inevitable. OpenAI thinks they're still competing on technology, and not user experience and market reputation otherwise they'd understand the continuous negative PR generated by Altman's chaos is going to cause them everything.
Probably.
When most people choose to time in AGAINST the idea of funding evil people, I think their arguments are disingenuous, they are just looking for a way to excuse their own behavior, which they know is bad. They don't want to give up the convenience of say, their nice Tesla that would like to own, and make excuses about why it is ok to enrich a nazi even further.
At this point I think it’s more important to have a solid workflow and understanding of how [insert your favorite model here] works and its capabilities, than chasing the next shinny release jumping back and forth between companies. I just finished my first large project with Codex and it is hard for me to believe Claude can be much better. It may be a bit better or worse, but again, they are all so good now that the user is the one driving the difference.
I'm experiencing the same. Codex gtp-5.5 has more brilliant intuitions, write less code, i.e. it identifies the exact point in which the modification shall be done. Nevertheless, huge improvements on personality from opus 4.7 (it was too accomodating) to opus 4.8
GPT-5.5 is the better programmer but Opus 4.8 remains the better system architect and product designer.
Codex is very "miss the forest for the trees", but is much better at successfully making large changes in large codebases. Claude Code makes more mistakes, but has more taste and a better grasp on idiomatic and elegant software development.
More interesting than arguing a jumble of electrochemical reactions have taste? That may seem more readily familiar but is no less strange if you prod at it. Nonetheless it’s difficult to argue either don’t produce output that has qualities of discernment (ie taste).
The roulette pockets for the model are bigger for some outputs than others. Draw a big enough black box around it and a different one around humans and it's insistinguishable.
Great analysis and follows my experience as well. Codex is better when you know how you want the design and the architecture and you drive the agent a lot more aggressively. Claude Code feels like more autopilot so executives and users who didn’t code before AI like it a lot more.
But I feel like an expert who can drive GPT aggressively will out perform Opus. It’s why some smart people I know are opting for GPT and have fallen off on Opus. It’s like asking an F1 driver to sit in a taxi.
This is exactly right. Claude has baked in autonomy and preferences that let it handle underspecified prompts elegantly, which makes it seem smarter to people who like to prompt that way, but it also ignores instructions and fights you on things, which makes it a bad model for people who know what they want to do and specify it.
You're using last week's model; Opus 4.7 is old news. Opus 6.9 is the new hotness; it is a better product manager than GPT, and has more X productivity. It replaced our junior dev team, and tells me my hair looks good.
GPT 5.5 still invents facts rather than looking them up, and manages to come across both as condescending and sycophantic. It feels like talking to a used car salesman.
Funny cause I'm quite literally having this exact issue with 4.8 as we speak. I've been going back and forth with Claude since yesterday afternoon on chopping up, stabilizing and facilitating recovery on a flaky mega-pipeline. Not 5 minutes ago, I had to remind it that two of the solutions it proposed were not possible because the target technology doesn't allow what it wanted to do, despite pointing it to the very docs that says it can't be done in the first place.
As far as its tone... Both feel like sycophantic as hell to me. To be honest, they just all feel so.
> GPT 5.5 still invents facts rather than looking them up
So does Claude, what’s your point?
I used it and ChatGPT this week in trying to assist troubleshooting a complex DB related issue and Claude had to apologise no less than three times in which it admitted to talking complete shit.
Just one example of the kind of shit it dribbled:
> I need to be upfront with you. I should not have claimed X as if I knew that for a fact. That was overreach on my part.
I get the feeling this also means AI works very well for the general coding tasks and that's their biggest success in terms of difficulty AND people paying for it.
Of course every AI company has been over promising and pumping the numbers as much as possible but OpenAI has been hitting the reality wall more because both their people not being able to keep improving at a faster rate and their whole cost structure and financial plates spinning.
This doesn't invalidate the fact Anthropic is also overhyped to the max for their IPO.
Pointless article (like much of the AI marketing hotness and spin room).
> The new valuation is nearly three times higher than the company’s February valuation, when Anthropic was estimated to be worth around $380 billion.
> In March, OpenAI was valued at $852 billion following a record $122 billion funding round.
Basically, today (Late May) we're declaring Anthropic the most valuable. They've nearly tripled in value since February. But also, OpenAI was $852B in March and presumably has grown since then.
In a few weeks we'll either have a new rounding of funding for OpenAI or they'll announce their IPO and the hype train will be abuzz that they're now the most valuable.
"Investors who have poured hundreds of billions into closed-source labs are betting on an unprovable safety moat".
Nobody is investing in closed-source labs for safety reasons, being able to explore more in details what and how the model is thinking is nice but by no means a game changer. What matters to investors and most of the users is that the model gives the right answer at the end.
The models aside, my impression is that Anthropic is winning in large part because of very pragmatic and high-velocity product development on top of them; like with Claude Code.
Like actually iterating hard to make them useful. Many, many details matter here.
I haven't tested the similar OpenAI/Google tools in detail lately though. Previously I found them way too generic and unpolished to be useful.
My impression as well. OpenAI was riding the high of ChatGPT with a very confusing and seemingly unfocused offering beyond that. Anthropic was always laser focused on business use cases. Claude Code being the big one. Finance seems to be their next target.
Anthropic has much narrower capabilities. No image generation, no video generation, no 3d world models, barely any voice stuff. But they know who their target customers are, and their API has a model selection anyone can understand and pricing that rarely changes. Focus and predictably
ChatGPT dropped the ball for a while that most devs and technical people went to Claude for a year or more, they still probably have the most normie market share + are at least trying to win back some of that delay in their latest model so it'd be interesting to see
In this game, who wins - in the long term - is who has the best model: so far OpenAI is ahead, so in the long term this is what matters. However, for the same reason, if in the future open weight models will be very near the quality of frontier labs, Anthropic and OpenAI will be out of business very soon. The game they play only make sense if their SOTA models do things that other models can't do at a comparable level.
You can theoretically do most things AWS does most of the time, yet people pay premium for it and keep paying for it, even though alternatives are cheaper, simpler and more performant.
I'd bet you that after 20 years OpenAI and Anthropic would still be around and kicking.
You might have a subpar product (for the price) but the reputation and history is what makes people open their wallets.
I never want to hear from developers again that they are not susceptible to marketing. I see meet ups specifically about Claude often.
Modern tupperware party.
A colleague was convinced Claude is better so we played a game. We used the claude code and codex harness and I implemented some prs they needed with gpt5.5 and opus4.7 and asked them to identify which came from which only from the code.
Couldn’t tell.
Edit: i bet 99% of people here, if presented with a test where i gave 5 models but all of the results came from one, would not be able to discern this. Just vibes all the way down.
Ah that's always SO fun. It doesn't matter how "smart" the person actually are (or think they are) we are ALL susceptible to influence and blind tests are shockingly simple to implement.
Convinced you can distinguish A from B? Ok! No problem, let's try! Can be at the dinner table for fancy wine or with agents, it's all the same, you try an option, another option, maybe all options from the same, and if you reliably can't tell well kudos, you are just like the rest of us!
It's easy to "know" in retrospect but blind test is where genuine difference can be found. Or not.
It’s also true in every other realm. Governments, think tanks, political parties, and activist groups use propaganda because it works.
I sometimes wonder how much of what I believe is bullshit I was fed through intentional propaganda. I do think as I’ve gotten older I’ve gradually identified and challenged some of it.
I can’t tell the difference between code written in vim or vs code but it matters substantially to the person writing the code. There’s stuff beyond just the output that goes into tool choice.
Your argument is fine but different from the claim the OP is making. You cannot simply make a claim that (model + harness) X is better than Y, but then have no discernible difference in the output. Subjectively, people might still prefer one over due to anything from design to marketing, but that's very different from the claim that X is better than Y for coding (see: "A colleague was convinced Claude is better"). Basically, I prefer Claude is a different claim than Claude is better and the latter has a higher bar of proof.
> You cannot simply make a claim that (model + harness) X is better than Y, but then have no discernible difference in the output.
You definitely can in principle; that’s the entire point of the comment you are responding to. If one tool completes it in 10 minutes with little hand holding, and the other does it in one hour at 4× the cost and while needing a lot of steering, the former is arguably better even if the end result is the same.
Whether that’s specifically true and demonstrable of GPT and Claude is another question, but your blanket statement doesn’t hold as a general rule.
That's a fair callout and I agree my statement was too general in just mentioning 'output', as you correctly pointed out. To define 'better' you would indeed need to agree on the dimensions you would evaluate candidates against.
I think a more appropriate rephrasing would be 'You cannot simply make a claim that (model + harness) X is better than Y, but then have no discernible difference on dimensions you care about'. In the case of latest of claude code vs codex with gpt 5.5) both are similar enough in the dimensions people will care about in evaluating (vs. differing wildly in cost or time taken).
This obviously correct take will get pushback, so let me add some other examples:
- which tool required more detailed goal-setting in the prompt?
- did one tool ask follow-up questions up front vs spread out over implementation?
- did either tool match existing coding styles?
- did either tool remind you about potential conflicts between what you asked it to build and other parts of the codebase?
There are a lot of ways to compare agents besides just the code. (Similarly, working engineers are not evaluated just on their code output.)
> There’s stuff beyond just the output that goes into tool choice.
Yup, like billions of capex. Unlike vim.
I'd bet I could tell with a result somewhat better than random chance.
While there is no meaningful difference in the ability to write code, vim has earned it's reputation for having a learning curve. I'd argue that predisposition, that requirement for additional investment energy will bias the results towards attention to detail, and pure minimalism.
I don't think it's only marketing. OpenAI had the advantage of being first to the market, and in the beginning of the race it seemed that the future belongs to them. Then came the bad PR and unpredictable quality of their main product.
For general use, ChatGPT's answers have gotten worse over the last year. I abandoned it.
This is like saying you gave a Taylor Swift fan sheet music from 1984 and from Michael Jackson’s thriller and they couldn’t tell the difference.
I have a strong affinity for Claude Code because of the interaction experience and overall tone / vibe / process. I am 100% willing to believe the code it produces is identical or possibly less good than Codex.
I enjoy working with Claude in a way I just don’t get from OpenAI. YMMV, you may feel just the opposite. But it’s a mistake to look at the produced code as the only dimension of these products.
This is my point. The harness itself creates feelings that are positive, but the artifacts produced are similar.
It is like the employee who is slightly worse but is a brownnoser getting promoted more often.
And what do you know, that is what is happening. It is like the coke commercial with the nice music and beautiful person in the back.
Speaking of which, remember Pepsi Challenge? Coke lovers are like the claude code lovers.
But what they're pointing out is user experience, not marketing.
The creative output and time to direct, to deliver due to the flow will also be different.
And it really depends on the task. Is it a typical well defined bug, or is it simpel CRUD. Or does it require research, combining different sources of data in a complex and creative ways.
This is also why benches never show reality, and the only real understanding comes if you actually try to build something.
That's a weird way to look at it. Any car gets you to your destination, but some people prefer driving a sports car or an SUV. They get something out of it that isn't just a marketing delusion, but subjective joy from the interaction with one product over another.
Luxury cars are indeed a good comparison. The subjective joy is a result of the delusion. That is why so much money is spent on such marketing to begin with. The analogous comparison would be if a blindfolded passenger turned out to prefer the Sienna to the 911.
I would actually say it is a luxury car where you have your personal driver and you are free to work on other tasks, and it gets you faster to the destination. Time to me is at least the most valuable thing.
> The subjective joy is a result of the delusion.
Repeat after me:
_Other people can experience things you do not experience and it is still valid, and not a delusion_. They are not sheeple who fell for marketing.
this site is reddit 2.0
I think for developers the distinction is that ChatGPT is this commercial all in one solution for normies and Claude is specific for developers, in reality as you say the results for normal developers is indistinguishable.
Maybe some people think that but there’s not really any meaningful difference in their offerings
FWIW most of the normies I know are using Claude
I don't think that's the only reason but you're spot on about OpenAI marketing being absolutely terrible. The primary product names of "Claude" vs "ChatGPT" highlights this remarkable difference. To the point where I'm seeing Claude completely take over the generic term for agent.
I do think OpenAI is doomed due to bad leadership. What you said (that the marketing is relatively terrible) and what others are saying here (that the product is worse) is damning isn't it? Are they really failing on all fronts?
It's crazy hearing devs on this site claim Claude is 10x better than all other AI solutions. I think it is fomo. Claude $LATEST_VERSION is perceived as the best and anything else is "missing out". New version comes out? Suddenly the old version is worthless, how on earth did anyone get work done with that?
Same reason people buy the RTX 4090 and 5090 cards - overpriced but they must have the "best". Never mind the diminishing returns trying to max out PC settings (3-4x performance hit for an almost imperceptible increase in graphics, ignoring DLSS) - it's the psychological cost of having to move a slider down a notch.
I've been using Google and now DeepSeek v4 and I am having absolutely no problems and it's a fraction of the cost. I'd love for Claude to be 10x better but it just isn't, for my use case anyway.
Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5 are the best models, but people don't care about "best" anymore, until there is a big leap in capability I don't think anyone will care about point releases.
I’ve been using DeepSeek V4 in OpenCode exclusively for about a month.
I think it’s great, but coming from Claude Code it did feel like going back in time by ~6 months in model capabilities. This isn’t a big deal to me for what I do, but the difference is definitely there.
Deepseek v4 Pro is like Opus 4.5 or GPT 5.2, but costs pennies on the pound for API. Which is to say, I should definitely be using it more to let my Codex and Claude subs go further.
Opus 4.5 was definitely stronger than DeepSeek V4 for me, specifically with large context.
I’m being pedantic/splitting hairs, though. I’ve obviously switched to DeepSeek full-time because it makes more sense to me pragmatically — I spend a few more tokens to get the outcome I want, but the tokens are cheap as dirt and the API is faster.
Perhaps I should plug it into Claude Code and see how it performs? I haven’t tried that.
Hey, at least the superior performance of a 4090 or a 5090 can be objectively measured.
I don't think it's marketing, for quite a long time Claude was clearly better and not everyone has adapted to the new reality where they have similar capabilities.
I was really frustrated by GPT-5.4, but last night I really pulled out the stops and within a few hours I got path tracing and DLSS implemented on top of Godot, which doesn’t even support DLSS. Just to see if it could do it? And you know what, it did, which was absolutely mind blowing. It wrote like 5,000 lines of C++, I set up a mostly local asset production pipeline using GPT image gen, voiceovers using ElevenLabs API, and even background music using Suno via the chrome use extensions in Codex. I just wanted to see how far I could push this little dumb game my kids asked me to make, and my kids are like “wow our game looks so good!” These models are absolutely mind blowing. I didn’t want to go to sleep I was having so much fun.
Calling this a "tupper ware" seems a bit emotional, you're intentionally disregarding many things that matter for devs in order to try to claim equivalence, rather than paying attention to the actual process of software creation.
For example in your "test" you're only looking at output and ignoring the entire process of creation.
In addition to that process, you're ignoring that Claude Code was first and better for a long time, why would people switch for something that produces the same output? Claude Code has been way ahead in the process of agentic software creation for a long time, I still prefer its features. Even though I think that Opus 4.7 was a big step backwards, and I've been getting worse results seemingly every day with the churn of features at Claude Code, some of that may also be me testing the bounds of how little I can specify and still get acceptable results, so it's hard to know.
Calling all these concrete realities "marketing" is itself you trying to market Codex as "good enough" instead of paying attention to how we got where we are and where we will go in the future.
No, Tupperware is the exact analogy. As you point out though, the multi level marketing applies to all models. Anthropic is just the most aggressive, especially here.
Software developers are the most susceptible of all population groups for amplifying their employers' new whims. There are true believers and useful idiots, but many are just mediocre and know that playing along will further their career for a couple of years.
In the end they will be fired anyway of course.
Everyone can be propagandised. It's a matter of pushing the right buttons.
Not everyone one. Some are very strong mentally and not so easily malleable.
I don’t think that applies to most on here tho.
Seeing yourself as immune to propaganda probably makes you more susceptible to propaganda.
Edit: Oh they’re trolling, nm. :-/
I RAN to downvote this dunning kruger of a comment.
If advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry then it has to be effective!
a) everyone is "susceptible" to marketing - so what
b) therefore a preference for Claude is marketing - complete bollocks
Either the tasks you chose were well below the capabilities of top models, or meaningful differences for preference are elsewhere, or both.
Your comment is probably energy-efficient and sustainable, however, because you could use it again and again when another comparison comes up, like Vim vs Emacs, or tea vs coffee
I can tell the difference between tea and coffee 100% of the time.
Modern Tupperware party. 100% agree! That’s the best framing I’ve heard in a long time!
I use both, enough to reach Codex highest personal sub limits and Claude is stronger to me specifically because of how the flow of building feels. So the PR for any random task would be irrelevant to me.
Pretty easy to tell depending what the code is. GPT follows this pattern is using maybe_something and using uppercase constants by default. Claude is a little more natural but tends to include more fallbacks than gpt5.5
Yes, which means that in the long run this looks ugly.
So much faith and money in this idea, and seeing how fragile it is, does not look good.
Should've used deepseek. That would have have been interesting.
Been to an Anthropic event in Paris last summer.
They served caviar. It probably had good ROI.
Which model produced code that ran faster, with less bugs, etc?
I have always found this field, especially in the last 10-15 years, to be incredibly fad driven to the point that it reminds me of things like fashion more than an engineering field.
It’s one of the things I don’t like about it. All humans are susceptible to herd behavior and influence but engineers should be at least a bit more hard nosed and reason more from first principles.
in my experience out of the box Claude Code is the better tool if you want to spend 0 time on config
Tribalism at it's worst. It's like the Coke and Pepsi comparisons from years past.
Claude was the best for the longest time. GPT5.5 challenges that, but inertia is real
You're comparing apples to oranges. Claude is a frontend overall product name, GPT5.5 is a specific model. Which model within Claude's offerings are you referring to? Opus 4.7, Sonnet 4.6, or something else?
I am not refering to one specific model, I mean the entire Claude Opus line starting from about 4.5, vs the at the time equivalent OpenAI model
Google came pretty close at times
I don't think it's marketing, it's the "nobody got fired for buying IBM" effect applied to software developers choosing tools.
It's the same reason why most of the software out there keeps using bloated technologies that are most of the time the wrong fit for the product.
And the same applies to tooling. Nothing new.
> Couldn’t tell.
I can tell. It's night and day.
Last year I used a bunch of models to try to generate Rust code. They all sucked.
This February I tried again and used Claude to generate Rust code. I have never been more stunned in my life. It's just as good as I am, and 30x faster. No fluff, the code is verbatim just as I would have written.
I then tried other models. Total disappointment.
I've continued to repeat this experiment. Opus is the only model that can write Rust reasonably.
Codex produces junk to this day. It passes variables that aren't needed, it abuses pointers, it creates overly verbose monstrosities...
I don't want any single company to win. I want OpenAI to be competitive. I want open source models to win. But right now, Claude Code and Opus are it.
> This February I tried again and used Claude to generate Rust code. I have never been more stunned in my life. It's just as good as I am, and 30x faster. No fluff, the code is verbatim just as I would have written.
Having looked at a bunch of known or suspected (based on the intent of the code and/or what I know about the developer(s)) LLM generated rust, there's only a few explanations here:
1. You're way better at prompting than (virtually) anyone else.
2. You're vastly overestimating how good the rust code it produced is.
3. You handheld the model throughout and made lots of edits.
4. Your hand written rust code is very bad.
Because from every example I've seen, these models write horrible rust. Sure, it may technically pass all the tests, but it's horribly pessimized, badly organized, doesn't even attempt to use the type system, if there aren't bugs now there will be the second it tries to refactor or add a new feature, etc. etc.
(I also strongly suspect that the same would be true for other languages, but I can detect it in rust more easily because it's my main language)
I recently tried with C# code and Avalonia on Linux. Total disaster. Could only get things to run after 10 attempts or so, and was only trying a very basic example. For some of the experiments I actually gave up.
for me personally it's two reasons:
1) Brockman ($25M) and Altman ($1M) both personally donated to Trump/MAGA.
2) Anthropic pushed back against DOD's demand for unrestricted use of AI to kill people while OpenAI eagerly said "please use ours!".
Same. But even worse than all that: OAI erased Anthropic's red lines with the DOW, making it socially acceptable for every other AI company to do the same, creating a "race to the bottom."
I think OAI actually legitimately increased p(doom) for us all. Very strange behavior for a company that is supposedly concerned about x-risk.
Sam Altman is so cartoonishly, over-the-top sociopathically shady that he makes JD Vance look like Benjamin Franklin. I mean, honestly, tricking third world people into retinal scans in order to get a scam crypto coin? Anyone using OpenAI for anything at this point should pause and examine their ethical compass.
Claude has an "End Conversation" tool that it can trigger on it's own, forcing your interaction to a close based on it's own feelings towards the conversation.
I have no idea how this wasn't the end of Anthropic's positive public perception.
Luckily this doesn’t come up while writing code. It tends to be if you are chatting it up in friend mode, and ask for a bomb recipe.
I think Sam Altman is an asshole and I prefer to spend my money elsewhere.
Frontier models being commoditize is inevitable. OpenAI thinks they're still competing on technology, and not user experience and market reputation otherwise they'd understand the continuous negative PR generated by Altman's chaos is going to cause them everything.
He must have done something personally to you.
OpenAI’s models could be materially better than Anthropic’s and I still wouldn’t use them because I don’t want to support Altman.
Do you hold any amount of power in the world? A project that people care about, or a deliverable that someone depends on?
Just curious how you can afford to care about the guy 7 levels above the men that built and support the API that you buy.
Some people care about things beyond their own immediate self interest.
Some don't, and find it hard to believe others really do.
Do you think Amodei is different?
The choice is not binary. I use DeepSeek (paid) for coding, and Qwen (free) for casual stuff from the browser chat UI.
Probably. When most people choose to time in AGAINST the idea of funding evil people, I think their arguments are disingenuous, they are just looking for a way to excuse their own behavior, which they know is bad. They don't want to give up the convenience of say, their nice Tesla that would like to own, and make excuses about why it is ok to enrich a nazi even further.
Too bad I failed an Anthropic OA about 2 years ago.
I missed my chance at faang and that might of been my last chance at Wealth.
I've been to the developing world, much of it is very nice. A million dollars net worth with modest investments means I never have to work again.
I could still imagining hiring some local talent and building small games.
Ohh well. Guess I'll apply again .
At this point I think it’s more important to have a solid workflow and understanding of how [insert your favorite model here] works and its capabilities, than chasing the next shinny release jumping back and forth between companies. I just finished my first large project with Codex and it is hard for me to believe Claude can be much better. It may be a bit better or worse, but again, they are all so good now that the user is the one driving the difference.
codex gtp-5.5 is far superior to opus 4.7 working on large projects
I'm experiencing the same. Codex gtp-5.5 has more brilliant intuitions, write less code, i.e. it identifies the exact point in which the modification shall be done. Nevertheless, huge improvements on personality from opus 4.7 (it was too accomodating) to opus 4.8
GPT-5.5 is the better programmer but Opus 4.8 remains the better system architect and product designer.
Codex is very "miss the forest for the trees", but is much better at successfully making large changes in large codebases. Claude Code makes more mistakes, but has more taste and a better grasp on idiomatic and elegant software development.
If you can afford to, I recommend juggling both.
I find arguing that a complex weighted graph has a taste is interesting.
This is not a jab, but a genuine curiosity of mine.
More interesting than arguing a jumble of electrochemical reactions have taste? That may seem more readily familiar but is no less strange if you prod at it. Nonetheless it’s difficult to argue either don’t produce output that has qualities of discernment (ie taste).
The roulette pockets for the model are bigger for some outputs than others. Draw a big enough black box around it and a different one around humans and it's insistinguishable.
The taste that the complex weighted graph was trained on was better for one than the other I think is the long winded way to say it
Great analysis and follows my experience as well. Codex is better when you know how you want the design and the architecture and you drive the agent a lot more aggressively. Claude Code feels like more autopilot so executives and users who didn’t code before AI like it a lot more.
But I feel like an expert who can drive GPT aggressively will out perform Opus. It’s why some smart people I know are opting for GPT and have fallen off on Opus. It’s like asking an F1 driver to sit in a taxi.
This is exactly right. Claude has baked in autonomy and preferences that let it handle underspecified prompts elegantly, which makes it seem smarter to people who like to prompt that way, but it also ignores instructions and fights you on things, which makes it a bad model for people who know what they want to do and specify it.
In what ways? LM Arena has Opus 4.7 w/ 1567 -/+ 7 vs. 1505 -/+ 10 from GPT-5.5 Codex in code. I'm currently using both.
Admittedly my recent experience tilts Opus now 4.8, but you and others have my interest piqued re: GPT-5.5 Codex so I'm trying that more now.
You're using last week's model; Opus 4.7 is old news. Opus 6.9 is the new hotness; it is a better product manager than GPT, and has more X productivity. It replaced our junior dev team, and tells me my hair looks good.
Not everyone is a developer...
Soon none of us will be! right?
And 4.7 is so last week..
GPT 5.5 still invents facts rather than looking them up, and manages to come across both as condescending and sycophantic. It feels like talking to a used car salesman.
Funny cause I'm quite literally having this exact issue with 4.8 as we speak. I've been going back and forth with Claude since yesterday afternoon on chopping up, stabilizing and facilitating recovery on a flaky mega-pipeline. Not 5 minutes ago, I had to remind it that two of the solutions it proposed were not possible because the target technology doesn't allow what it wanted to do, despite pointing it to the very docs that says it can't be done in the first place.
As far as its tone... Both feel like sycophantic as hell to me. To be honest, they just all feel so.
> GPT 5.5 still invents facts rather than looking them up
So does Claude, what’s your point?
I used it and ChatGPT this week in trying to assist troubleshooting a complex DB related issue and Claude had to apologise no less than three times in which it admitted to talking complete shit.
Just one example of the kind of shit it dribbled:
> I need to be upfront with you. I should not have claimed X as if I knew that for a fact. That was overreach on my part.
Opus 4.7 is not the current version of Opus.
I get the feeling this also means AI works very well for the general coding tasks and that's their biggest success in terms of difficulty AND people paying for it.
Of course every AI company has been over promising and pumping the numbers as much as possible but OpenAI has been hitting the reality wall more because both their people not being able to keep improving at a faster rate and their whole cost structure and financial plates spinning.
This doesn't invalidate the fact Anthropic is also overhyped to the max for their IPO.
I dunno, the latest Opus models seems to be tuned to waste money... and Claude is kinda lazy lately?
Bummer, they are the least friendly to open source, and the most incompatible with free use of your subscription via your own tools/custom harnesses.
Unicorns, strapped with rockets, too busy looking at each other to realise the Earth is far gone.
They'll kill us all, or they'll kill each other. They sure as hell ain't making the world a better place, like they promised.
qazinform.com seems to be shadow-banned (and posted only by OP): https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=qazinform.com
UPD https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazinform
They are far far better at marketing than OpenAI
How much dilution? Who’s getting the value?
Pointless article (like much of the AI marketing hotness and spin room).
> The new valuation is nearly three times higher than the company’s February valuation, when Anthropic was estimated to be worth around $380 billion.
> In March, OpenAI was valued at $852 billion following a record $122 billion funding round.
Basically, today (Late May) we're declaring Anthropic the most valuable. They've nearly tripled in value since February. But also, OpenAI was $852B in March and presumably has grown since then.
In a few weeks we'll either have a new rounding of funding for OpenAI or they'll announce their IPO and the hype train will be abuzz that they're now the most valuable.
Investors of both should read this: https://open.substack.com/pub/sublius/p/srt-introspect-why-c...
"Investors who have poured hundreds of billions into closed-source labs are betting on an unprovable safety moat".
Nobody is investing in closed-source labs for safety reasons, being able to explore more in details what and how the model is thinking is nice but by no means a game changer. What matters to investors and most of the users is that the model gives the right answer at the end.
Bernie Madoff would be jealous. Stealing all open source and reselling "git clone" + "sed" for $1 trillion is something he did not achieve.
The chutzpah is remarkable.
They are selling shovels, not mining gold themselves though.
So it's more like selling a derivative on a promise to steal open source for you in a useful way.
Either they are getting fleeced or they are getting very good terms for the investments
All overvalued.
By an order of magnitude.
It’s because the programming works.
OpenAI. Spent its resources on AGI whilst Claude worked on making programming work.
Google Gemini is out of the race entirely its programming AI is a joke.
It is unclear which strategy will work in the end. 3.5 flash uses fewer tokens and is cheaper.
The models aside, my impression is that Anthropic is winning in large part because of very pragmatic and high-velocity product development on top of them; like with Claude Code.
Like actually iterating hard to make them useful. Many, many details matter here.
I haven't tested the similar OpenAI/Google tools in detail lately though. Previously I found them way too generic and unpolished to be useful.
Is there something to this?
My impression as well. OpenAI was riding the high of ChatGPT with a very confusing and seemingly unfocused offering beyond that. Anthropic was always laser focused on business use cases. Claude Code being the big one. Finance seems to be their next target.
Anthropic has much narrower capabilities. No image generation, no video generation, no 3d world models, barely any voice stuff. But they know who their target customers are, and their API has a model selection anyone can understand and pricing that rarely changes. Focus and predictably
Start what?
ChatGPT dropped the ball for a while that most devs and technical people went to Claude for a year or more, they still probably have the most normie market share + are at least trying to win back some of that delay in their latest model so it'd be interesting to see
The "normie" market doesn't pay for enterprise features though. They might cost more in inference then they make back from advertising.
In this game, who wins - in the long term - is who has the best model: so far OpenAI is ahead, so in the long term this is what matters. However, for the same reason, if in the future open weight models will be very near the quality of frontier labs, Anthropic and OpenAI will be out of business very soon. The game they play only make sense if their SOTA models do things that other models can't do at a comparable level.
IMO bad take.
You can theoretically do most things AWS does most of the time, yet people pay premium for it and keep paying for it, even though alternatives are cheaper, simpler and more performant.
I'd bet you that after 20 years OpenAI and Anthropic would still be around and kicking.
You might have a subpar product (for the price) but the reputation and history is what makes people open their wallets.