A lot is changing. Like 9months ago, I was convinced Claude was best. I'm not so sure anymore :^)

Sure, none of this is rational.

Some of its timing: Claude Code was good before other harnesses and so behaviors (and contracts) were timed to lock in on that ecosystem.

Some of it was ethical/political: Anthropic fighting with the Trump admin about use of the model.

Some of it is social: Never overrate a CEO just being kind of perceived as a piece of shit by people who have power to influence decisions.

But switching costs are low! Because of the same models!

Let the race to the bottom commence. Hopefully before the monopoly/collusion starts.

IME Claude has been a bit inferior. But, yeah, the marketing is just great.

If advertising is a multi-billion dollar industry then it has to be effective!

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!".

Which model produced code that ran faster, with less bugs, etc?

100%

The belief structures here are really interesting. Blind tests would likely illuminate a lot of why people think that

I mean, yes? Anthropic’s investors are seeing more upside now and valuing the company higher. Your thesis is that this additional value is driven by better marketing rather than a superior model. Could be! The truth is we’ll never really know with certainty what factors are doing the heavy lifting here, we can only guess and argue over who’s a better guesser.

That sounds like someone desperately trying ton convince people Pesi is better than Coke

I find this pattern annoying and also commonplace: MY taste is correct. I AM right. The emergent properties of free market resulting from revealed preferences of free willed agents is WRONG.

Any name suitable to name this phenomenon?

I think frontier models are bait now. I prefer a fast, less thoughtful model that adhere's to instructions. The code these latest models produce is often hot garbage and you still need to micro-manage. Fast with small chunks is better.

> 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.

Tribalism at it's worst. It's like the Coke and Pepsi comparisons from years past.

Isn't the experience of interacting with the models appreciably different? It's not all about the outcome. Not to mention the harnesses are increasingly the real product.

in my experience out of the box Claude Code is the better tool if you want to spend 0 time on config

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.

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.

I did a pair programming comparison over 3 month on Codex 5.2 and Claude Sonnet and my subjective experience was that based on cost and rollbacks to a previous commit Claude is significantly better. Especially in VS Code Copilot. I wrote a long Substack post about it. I would share its but its in the paywalled archive by now.

Maybe some of these companies will learn to stop appointing awful leadership then.

Having a sleazy CEO like Sam Altman or Elon Musk is a business risk. Many potential customers don’t like these people and they say abrasive and alienating things publicly.

Rolling over to the DoD’s desire for fully automated weaponry is more bad marketing. How many people switched from OpenAI to Anthropic over that? I sure did. Anthropic’s willingness to burn that bridge over an ethical stance said a lot about the company to me.

I’m not going to use OpenAI products for these reasons among others.

I’m also not going to use Cursor as xAI plans to acquire Cursor.

Maybe it’s foolish of me to avoid those companies for such petty reasons, but that’s not my problem. That’s their problem.

It takes years to build trust and hours to burn that trust to the ground. Customers can hold grudges for a lifetime.

This is especially true in a market with almost zero product differentiation.

Who doesn't think they are susceptible to marketing?

That seems like a strawman.

You're delusional. Anthropic's success is not only the model - it's the harness. I'd absolutely be able to tell the difference between Claude Code and, say, Gemini CLI.

Nothing new. I used to work with .NET and went to some meetups and conferences. There are some hardcore Microsoft fanboys out there. Didn’t even mix the kool-aid, ate it right from the packet. They only know MS products and seem scared of anything else.

Maybe not your typical HN crowd but marketing absolutely works on developers.

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.

[dead]

If Claude meetups are the new Tupperware parties, OpenClaw meetups are something darker still. The tech is indeed worth discussion and celebration, but the Brands are clearly taking too much.

This is a really important insight. Great comment.

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.