Claude Code has been bleh or meh at best in my experience. There's so many posts on HN fawning about it lately that it could only be a guerrilla marketing campaign.
You still need to give it precise context and instructions when dealing with things that are not web apps or some other software cliche.
The reasoning is great in opus, unbeatable at the moment.
I understand what you mean, it becomes disappointing on more niche or specific work.
It’s honestly a good thing to see these models are not really intelligent yet.
I still don't trust any AI enough to generate or edit code, except for some throwaway experiments, because every time I tried it's been inefficient or too verbose or just plain wrong.
I use it for reviewing existing code, specifically for a components-based framework for Godot/GDScript at [0]. You can view the AGENTS.md and see that it's a relatively simple enough project: Just for 2D games and fairly modular so the AI can look at each file/class individually and have to cross-reference maybe 1-3 dependencies/dependents at most at any time during a single pass.
I've been using Codex, and it's helped me catch a lot of bugs that would have taken a long time on my own to even notice at all. Most of my productivity and the commits from the past couple months are thanks to that.
Claude on the other hand, oh man… It just wastes my time. It's had way more gaffes than Codex, on the exact same code and prompts.
I had a similar experience and the answer appears to be learning how to use a specific model for a specific task using a specific harness (model X task X harness). Another, and somewhat related, lesson learned is understanding how to work with a given model and not against it.
I still get really mad at AI sometimes and I am not sure whether I could use AI for coding full time.
I use Codex regularly and Claude is shit in comparison, from its constant "Oops you're right!!" backtracking to its crap Electron app (if their AI is so good why can't they make a fucking native app for each OS?)
Hell right freakin now I asked it to implement something and got a weird "Something went wrong" API error
I use both, read what I need to read and fix small issues myself. Both Agents are pure magic and none of their issues warrant a tantrum on a public forum.
> none of their issues warrant a tantrum on a public forum
I don't get frustrated if a problem is genuinely difficult to solve and the product creator is trying their best,
I get frustrated when a problem has been solved by other similar products but a specific creator or provider refuses to follow suit and fix their shit.
Claude's Electron app vs. Codex's native app is one such example right off the first impression of both products.
Oh my fuck, I was led to believe that the Codex Mac app was native. Codex itself said so. Google also said so but now it says different.
Codex definitely "feels" more native than Claude: Proper menus etc, like when you right-click on a session in the sidebar, Codex shows an actual context menu, whereas Claude reveals its HTML-rendered jank and highlights the word you right-clicked on as if the sidebar item is just a plain textbox, ugh
The Claude desktop app is way worse than the Codex desktop app
Even the AI itself is goofy. So many false positives during reviews immediately backtracked with "You're right, I'm sorry" in the next response.
It seems like there's either a paid pro-Anthropic PR campaign on HN because the comments fawning about it don't match my experience with Claude at all, or I keep getting the worse end of the A/B testing stick..
> I really dislike Apple’s choice to clutter macOS Tahoe’s menus with icons.
> It makes menus hard to scan
I disagree, I like them, and I'm glad there's an option
With billions of users, it doesn't make sense to offer just one style for everything for everyone, like all the OSes are these days. Hell the Switch and Switch 2 still doesn't have much options beyond Bright/Dark mode.
The only actual solution is customizability; let users fuck themselves up however they want, but always leave a quick "Reset to Defaults" panic button within reach :)
I had a taxi driver ask me for help with their Android phone after their kid did something and now their phone kept getting ads every 5 minutes in every app no matter what they were doing
It also seemingly broke removing Safari cookies on a per website basis, something I often used to stop Google's scummy tracking across all their services if you just want to sign into YouTube.
It's like the Gremlins
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