Comment by infecto
3 days ago
Inversely I don’t understand the praise for CC. These days it feels like bloatware. It absolutely can get the work done but when I measure on token and time use it ends up being a multiple of pi like harnesses.
CC works but for me it felt like increasingly they have zero incentive to make it a great experience. You hear folks like Boris talk about spinning up thousands of agents over night and agents chatting back and forth in GitHub issues and while I think it’s great from figuring out what the future looks like I don’t think it represents the reality of ROI today. So the folks building the tool are so disconnected I am simply not sure it’s a great experience anymore.
So is the quantitative difference in token use the only difference or do you think there's also a different qualitat? I'm on CC only and immensely happy. Very productive both at work and privately and at work I average around $250 a month which probably means nothing but it's little compared to my salary.
Is that the main concern though, cost?
For me, at least it's that the newer Claude models seem optimised for one-shotting things, which is not what I want. As the amount of code per turn increases, I have a harder job keeping up and ensuring that it's doing what I want.
That being said, I had to nope out of a similar thing from GPT 5.6 today, so it appears to be a US frontier lab issue. Claude is particularly bad though, as it produces far too much code even when I tell it not to, unlike GPT (and Kimi) which at least listen to me a little better.
More generally, I want a usable human review experience, and Claude code doesn't deliver that for me.
Quality is hard to measure and I would not say the concern is so much cost but the intersection of cost and time. Often I am jamming on something and I like being somewhat in the loop. So maybe same level of quality, I am using Anthropic modela for both harnesses, but I get to the output quicker and at a drastically lower cost.