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Comment by iso-logi

11 hours ago

I switched from OpenAI to Anthropic over the weekend due to the OpenAI fiasco.

I haven't been using the service long enough to comment on the quality of the responses/code generation, although the outages are really quite impactful.

I feel like half of my attempted times using Claude have been met with an Error or Outage, meanwhile the usage limits seem quite intense on Claude Code. I asked Claude to make a website to search a database. It took about 6 minutes for Claude to make it, meanwhile it used 60% of my 4h quota window. I wasn't able to re-find it past asking it to make some basic font changes until I became limited. Under 30 minutes and my entire 4 hour window was used up.

Meanwhile with ChatGPT Codex, a multi-hour coding session would still have 20%+ available at the end of the 4/5 hour window.

I have been using anthropic almost exclusively for a year, while trying other models, and this has literally never happened. I have NEVER experienced a downtime event. At most a random error in a chat but that is immediately solved on the subsequent request. I use the desktop app, the mobile app, the api with several apps in production that I monitor and reliability has never been an issue.

I pay about $1500 per month on personal api use fyi.

  • I assume you're doing things with the API that aren't coding tasks that could be done with Claude Code? Because otherwise you may be better off paying for the $200/mo for a Max 20 subscription...

  • I’ve had semi regular downtime since I stayed using Claude about two months ago. I love it but I find it less reliable than alternatives. This is evidenced on their status page (regularly showing red bars).

    • I often wondered if this is timezone related. Those of us awake during the quieter times might see fewer issues?

  • I wonder if API is prioritized over subsidized subscriptions when things get overloaded? This seems to be a common pattern I've seen.

    • This has not been my experience. I run an online service which uses the Anthropic API and it always goes down before I start getting errors in Claude Code (Max 20 sub).

Codex limits are weird, I can’t barely use up all the limits of the basic subscription.

Switched to Claude max just because I can combine both. I can say since the weekend, I only have had problems. When it works it’s great. But I am seriously thinking to just cancelling this experiment.

Yeah this is a huge problem for Anthropic and its why I unfortunately haven't been able to kill of my ChatGPT subscription yet.

You're not wrong, for sufficient simple cases it's at a disadvantage. But once things get complicated, it wins by being the only thing that you can get to work without going insane.

And yeah, any serious use completely assumes a Max sub.

I suspect the spike in problems is due to a major spike in usage and uptake as a lot of folks are doing what you’re doing.