alt Hacker NewsYesterday was my first time trying it. One thing that felt a bit strange to me was that I asked it something and the response was just one paragraph. Which isn't bad or anything but it felt... strange? Like I always need to preface ChatGPT/gemini/whatever question with "Briefly, what is..." or it gives me enough fluff to fill a 5 page high school essay. But I didn't need to do that and just got an answer that was to the point and without loads of shit that's barely related.
And the weirdest thing that I noticed: instead of skimming the response to try finding what was relevant, I just straight up read it. Kind of felt like I got a slight amount of focus ability back.
Accuracy is something I can't really compare yet (all chatbots feel generally the same for non-pro level queries), but so far, I'm fairly satisfied.
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That tracks for me; longtime claude, claude code pro subscriber (not all of it has been good - but that's neither here nor there).
Over the last few iterations of Sonnet and Opus, anthropic has definitely trained me to ask it to explain something "in detail" (or even "in great detail") when I want as much nuance as possible.
It used to be the inverse - way too much detail when I didn't want it.
One issue is that Claude’s web search abilities are more limited, for example it can’t search Reddit and Stack Overflow for relevant content.
Heh, a while ago I wondered why ChatGPT had started to reply tersely, almost laconically. Then I remembered that I had explicitly told it to be brief by default in the custom personality settings… I also noticed that there are now various sliders to control things like how many emojis or bulletpoint lists ChatGPT should use, which I though was amusing. Anyway, these tools can be customized to adopt just about any style, there's no need to always prefix questions with "Briefly" or similar.
Yeah, I've always been a little confused why people use ChatGPT so heavily. It's better than it used to be (maybe thanks to custom configuration), but it still tends to respond like it's writing a Wikipedia article.
Wikipedia articles on demand are great, but not usually what I want.
Yep the experience is quite something. Another thing I've noticed, and you likely soon will also, is that Claude only attempts a follow-up if the one is needed or the prompt is structured for it. Meanwhile ChatGPT always prompts you with a choice of next steps. It can be nice, as sometimes the options contain improvements you never thought of and would like, but in lengthy conversations with a detailed plan it does things really piecemeal, as though trained to maximize engagement instead of getting to a final solution.
> Which isn't bad or anything but it felt... strange?
On the contrary, it's great. It's fully capable of outputting a wall of text when required, so instead of feeling like I'm talking to something that has a minimum word count requirement, I get an appropriate sized response to the task at hand.
In my limited experience, that's mostly since the 4.6 release. I noticed that with the same prompt, it answers much more briefly. A bit jarring indeed, but I prefer it. Less bs and filler, and less burning off electricity for nothing.
I use Gemini all the time, but I have to say it's got verbal diarrhea and an EXTREMELY annoying trait of wanting to lead the conversation rather than just responding to what YOU want to do. At the end of every response Gemini will always suggest a "next step", in effect trying to 2nd guess where you want the conversation to go. I'd much rather have an AI that just did what it was asked, and let me decide what to ask next (often nothing - maybe it was just a standalone question!).
Apparently this annoying "next step" behavior is driven by the system prompt, since the other day I was running Gemini 3 Thinking, and it was displaying it's thoughts which included a reminder to itself to check that it was maintaining a consistent persona, and to make sure that it had suggested a next step. I'd love to know the thought process of whoever at Google thought that this would make for a natural or useful conversation flow! Could you imagine trying to have a conversation with a human who insisted on doing this?!