6 ms·

Whatever the benchmarks might say, there's something about Claude that seems to deliver consistently (although not always perfect) quite reliable outputs across

Whatever the benchmarks might say, there's something about Claude that seems to deliver consistently (although not always perfect) quite reliable outputs across various coding tasks. I wonder what that 'secret sauce' might be and whether GPT-5 has figured it out too.

atonse 1y ago
That's been my experience too. Even though Gemini also does seem to do the fancy one-shot demo code well, in day to day coding, Claude seems to do a much better job of just understanding how programming actually works, what to do, what not to do, etc.
weego 1y ago
Agreed, I always give my one pager product briefs to AI to break down into phases and tasks, and then progress trackers. I explicitly prompt for verbose phases, tasks and test plans. Yesterday without much promoting Claude 4.1 gave me 10 phases, each with 5-12 tasks that could genuinely be used to kanban out a product step by step. Claude 3.7 sonnet was effectively the same with fewer granular suggestions for programming strategies. Gemini 2.5 gave me a one pager back with some trivial bullet points in 3 phases, no tasks at all. o3 did the same as as Gemini, just less coherent. Claude just has whatever the thing is for now
- unshavedyak 1y ago
  How are you having claude track these phases/tasks? Eg are you having it write to a TASKS.md and update it after each phase?
  - m3kw9 1y ago
    Just say begin task 1, 2 etc scroll back and see the task. Or copy paste into notes and do them sequenced
- concinds 1y ago
  Gemini Pro or Flash?
- SequoiaHope 1y ago
  If you have any examples of these one pagers I’d love to see them!
bamboozled 1y ago
Claude is fast too, Gemini isn’t as good and just gets hung up on things Claude doesn’t.
deadbabe 1y ago
The secret is just better context engineering. There is no other “secret” sauce, all these models are built on the same concepts.
dudeinhawaii 1y ago
My experience has been that Claude Code is exceptional at tool use (and thus working with agentic IDEs) but... not the smartest coder. It will happy re-invent the wheel, create silos, or generate terrible code that you'll only discover weeks or months later. I've had to rollback weeks of code to discover major edge regressions that Claude had introduced. Now, someone will say 'add more tests'. Sure. But that's a bandaid. I find that the 'smarter' models like Gemini and o3 output better quality code overall and if you can afford to send them the entire context in a non-agentic way .. then they'll generate something dramatically superior to the agentic code artifacts. That said, sometimes you just want speed to proof a concept and Claude is exceptional there. Unfortunately, proof of concepts often... become productionized rather than developers taking a step back to "do it right".
- dagss 1y ago
  I disagree that tests are bandaids. Humans needs tests to avoid doing regressions. If you avoid tests you are giving the AI a much harder task than what human programmers usually have.

atonse 1y ago

That's been my experience too. Even though Gemini also does seem to do the fancy one-shot demo code well, in day to day coding, Claude seems to do a much better job of just understanding how programming actually works, what to do, what not to do, etc.

weego 1y ago

Agreed, I always give my one pager product briefs to AI to break down into phases and tasks, and then progress trackers. I explicitly prompt for verbose phases, tasks and test plans. Yesterday without much promoting Claude 4.1 gave me 10 phases, each with 5-12 tasks that could genuinely be used to kanban out a product step by step. Claude 3.7 sonnet was effectively the same with fewer granular suggestions for programming strategies. Gemini 2.5 gave me a one pager back with some trivial bullet points in 3 phases, no tasks at all. o3 did the same as as Gemini, just less coherent. Claude just has whatever the thing is for now

unshavedyak 1y ago
How are you having claude track these phases/tasks? Eg are you having it write to a TASKS.md and update it after each phase?
- m3kw9 1y ago
  Just say begin task 1, 2 etc scroll back and see the task. Or copy paste into notes and do them sequenced
concinds 1y ago
Gemini Pro or Flash?
SequoiaHope 1y ago
If you have any examples of these one pagers I’d love to see them!

bamboozled 1y ago

Claude is fast too, Gemini isn’t as good and just gets hung up on things Claude doesn’t.

deadbabe 1y ago

The secret is just better context engineering. There is no other “secret” sauce, all these models are built on the same concepts.

dudeinhawaii 1y ago

My experience has been that Claude Code is exceptional at tool use (and thus working with agentic IDEs) but... not the smartest coder. It will happy re-invent the wheel, create silos, or generate terrible code that you'll only discover weeks or months later. I've had to rollback weeks of code to discover major edge regressions that Claude had introduced. Now, someone will say 'add more tests'. Sure. But that's a bandaid. I find that the 'smarter' models like Gemini and o3 output better quality code overall and if you can afford to send them the entire context in a non-agentic way .. then they'll generate something dramatically superior to the agentic code artifacts. That said, sometimes you just want speed to proof a concept and Claude is exceptional there. Unfortunately, proof of concepts often... become productionized rather than developers taking a step back to "do it right".

dagss 1y ago
I disagree that tests are bandaids. Humans needs tests to avoid doing regressions. If you avoid tests you are giving the AI a much harder task than what human programmers usually have.