Comment by pjerem
3 days ago
You really can’t compare free "check my algorithm" ChatGPT with $200/month "generate a working product" Claude Code.
I’m not saying Claude Code is perfect or is the panacea but those are really different products with orders of magnitude of difference in capabilities.
Claude 4? Or is Claude Code really so much better than say Aider also using Claude 4?
The scaffolding and system prompting around Claude 4 is really, really good. More importantly it’s advanced a lot in the last two months. I would definitely not make assumptions that things are equal without testing.
It's both Claude 4 Opus and the secret sauce that Claude Code has for UX (as well as Claude.md files for project/system rules and context) that is the killer I think. The describe, build, test cycle is very tight and produces consistently high quality results.
Aider feels a little clunky in comparison, which is understandable for a free product.
Yes. The tooling harness of Claude Code is really good, and Claude 4 is well-optimized for it. The combination is very powerful.
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That's pretty much impossible comparison to make. Workflow between two is very different, aider has way more toggles. I can tell you that Aider using sonnet-4 started Node.js library in otherwise rust project given the same prompt as claud code that did finish the task.