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Comment by kamma4434

3 days ago

My impression is that at the moment the value you get out of Claude is simply incredible.

As a senior engineer, you get an assistant that never gets tired and can do quite a lot on its own. For me, it’s been an eye-opening experience. I used to have a collaborator called M that had a good general culture, but was not too smart. The calculation going into my mind every time I ask Claude for something is: how much would that cost, in terms of time and effort, to get M to do that? M was a resource that costed many thousand dollars per month, plus the time I spent correcting and directing, while Claude is actually smarter and does what it is asked with a degree of autonomy and common sense that M could never dream of.

The flipside of the coin is obvious: Anthropic will find a way to claw back - no pun intended - some of this value by raising the cost of subscription. They would be crazy not to.

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kamma4434

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lukewarm707  3 days ago

value is high but what about the competitors?

is claude that good? the last time i tried claude it was sonnet 4.5. it was ok, not worth the api money clearly. but i only use api tokens for llms.

  • port11  3 days ago

    If you look at SWE, Claude models aren’t that special. Other benchmarks come up with different results.

    But… anecdotally, Claude is just that good. Gemini needs a lot of hand-holding, and it will still tell you it’s done when it achieved half the work. Or say, “this test isn’t passing, I’ll just delete it”. Every now and then I get tired of it and give the same task to Sonnet 4.6; 5 minutes later I’m done. Bug fixed, UI properly working, React hooks not being conditionally rendered, theme variables used properly. It’s wonderful.

    I’m not sure about large agentic work or deep thinking, but I’m mostly automating away the drudgery of dealing with React Native. I still want to do the deeper work myself, but even there Opus is usually a really good sparing partner.