> 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.

I think you're missing one (or more) of the facets individuals decide "better" is, for the subjective individual.

Early on i hopped between all the providers. Code quality for SOTA at the time was pretty decent if you didn't ask it to solve challenging problems. However the thing i found most difficult is consistency in how it listened. Eg Gemini (i forget what version, not current) was super prone to focusing solely on the functionality/goal, but not any of the directions on how to write the code. It would throw in comments everywhere, document in a manner i didn't want, use abstractions i told it not to, etc.

How well a model would follow instructions to drop their horrible "isms" was the #1 criteria for me. If i have to constantly remind the model not to do X behavior then it's a terrible model.

With that said, that is why i chose Claude for the last N months. However i've stuck with Claude because dealing with these "isms" and their little behavioral nuances is a chore in itself. I've found you have to learn the model just as much as anything, and so the idea of hopping these days when i'm just trying to get shit done is not likely.

These days for me personally, Claude has to give me a reason to switch rather than me investing even more money (i'm on the 20x plan) in other providers. I'm definitely not committed to Claude Code, but i am tired of the LLM churn, tooling churn, subscription churn, and the general fear of which providers we can trust.

edit: In short, it's the interactive UX just as much as it is the final output.