alt Hacker News> does it really matter anymore?
They're different models with different philosophies behind them. This is anecdotal with a user group of 1, but in my experience:
Claude has a stronger personality and is more creative. If you give it vague instructions, it's better at filling in the blanks with reasonable ideas.
GPT-5.5 is better at following instructions. If you know exactly what you want, it will do it without going off the rails. It's also less likely to imply that you're dumb, but I don't really care about that. Some people do.
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I wish models called me out more! I can’t count the number of times I’ve had an absolute shit plan, prompted it, and the model built it to a tee. Then I look at the code, and it’s an absolute mess, because it had to make my stupid idea work. Maybe I need a better system prompt.
I’ve found that Claude is very literal. When I talk to 5.5 it gets what i want it to do, when I talk to Opus 4.8 it does what I say literally and doesn’t get the intent behind it.