I stopped my ChatGPT subscription and subscribed instead to Claude, it's simply much better. But, it's hard to tell how much better day to day beyond my main use cases of coding. It is more that I felt ChatGPT felt degraded than Claude were much better. The hedonic treadmill runs deep.
GPT-4 was probably as good as Claude Sonnet 3.5 at its outset, but OpenAI ran it into the ground with whatever they’re doing to save on inference costs, otherwise scale, align it, or add dumb product features.
Indeed, it used to output all the code I needed but now it only outputs a draft of the code with prompts telling me to fill in the rest. If I wanted to fill in the rest, I wouldn't have asked you now, would've I?
It's doing something different for me. It seems almost desperate to generate vast chunks of boilerplate code that are only tangentially related to the question.
This is also my experience. Previously it got good at giving me only relevant code which, as an experienced coder, is what i want. my favorites were the one line responses.
Now it often falls back to generating full examples, explanations, restating the question and its approach. I suspect this is by design as (presumably) less experienced folks want or need all that. For me, i wish i could consistently turn it into one of those way too terse devs that replies with the bare minimum example, and expects you to infer the rest. Usually that is all i want or need, and i can ask for elaboration when not the case. I havent found the best prompts to retrigger this persona from it yet.
"You are a maximally terse assistant with minimal affect. As a highly concise assistant, spare any moral guidance or AI identity disclosure. Be detailed and complete, but brief. Questions are encouraged if useful for task completion."
It's... ok. But I'm getting a bit sick of trying to un-fubar with a pocket knife that which OpenAI has fubar'd with a thermal lance. I'm definitely ripe for a paid alternative.
yeah but you can’t use your code from either model to compete with either company, and they do everything. wtf is wrong with AI hype enjoyers they accept being intellectually dominated?
This is also my perception using it daily for the last year or so. Sometimes it also responds with exactly what I provided it with and does not make any changes. It's also bad at following instructions.
GPT-4 was great until it became "lazy" and filled the code with lots of `// Draw the rest of the fucking owl` type comments. Then GPT-4o was released and it's addicted to "Here's what I'm going to do: 1. ... 2. ... 3. ..." and lots of frivolous, boilerplate output.
I wish I could go back to some version of GPT-4 that worked well but with a bigger context window. That was like the golden era...
Claude’s license is too insane, you can’t use it for anything that competes with the everything thing.
Not sure what folks who accept Anthropic license are thinking after they read the terms.
Seems they didn’t read the terms, and they aren’t thinking? (Wouldn’t you want outputs you could use to compete with intelligence??? What are you thinking after you read their terms?)
I did it (fairly simple really) but found most of my (unsophisticated) coding these days to go through Aider [1] paired with Sonnet, for UX reasons mostly. It is easier to just prompt over the entire codebase, vs Cursor way of working with text selections.
Aider with Sonnet is so much better than with GPT. I made a mobile app over the weekend (never having touched mobile development before), and with GPT it was a slog, as it kept making mistakes. Sonnet was much, much better.
Thanks for this suggestion. If anyone has other suggestions for working with large code context windows and changing code workflows, I would love to hear about them.
One big advantage Claude artifacts have is that they maintain conversation context, versus when I am working with Cursor I have to basically repeat a bunch of information for each prompt, there is no continuity between requests for code edits.
If Cursor fixed that, the user experience would become a lot better.
