[visiondude]

I completely agree with this. The amount of unprompted “I used to love Claude Code but now…” content that follows the exact same pattern feels really off. All of these people post without any prompts for comparison, and OP even refused to share specifics so we have to take his claim as ‘trust me bro’

[loveparade]

It doesn't feel off to me because that's the exact experience I've had as well. So it's unsurprising to me that many other people share that experience. I'm sure there is a bunch of paid promotion going on for all kinds of stuff on HN (especially what gets onto the front page), but I don't think this is one of those cases.

[visiondude]

Oh cool, can you share concrete examples of times codex out performed Claude Code? I’m my experience both tools needs to be carefully massaged with context to fulfill complex task.

[typpilol]

In my experience. Claude wants to try and finish everything as quickly as possible where codex is happy to take 5x the length.

The best answer is each has its uses. Using codex to do bulk edits is dumb because it takes forever, etc etc

[loveparade]

I don't really see how examples are useful because you're not going to understand the context. My prompt may be something like "We recently added a new transcription backend api (see recent git commits), integrate it into the service worker. Before implementing, create a detailed plan, ask clarifying questions, and ask for approval before writing code"

Does that help you? I doubt it. But there you go.

[hluska]

Nobody has to give you examples. People can express opinions. If you disagree, that’s fine but requesting entire prompt and response sets is quite demanding. Who are you to be that demanding?

[dns_snek]

> Who are you to be that demanding?

Let's call it the skeptical public? We've been listening to a group of people rave about how revolutionary these tools are, how they're able to perform senior level developer work, how good their code is, and how they're able to work autonomously through the use of sub-agents (i.e. vibe coding), without ever providing evidence that would support any of those grandiose claims.

But then I use these tools myself[1] and I speak to real developers who have used them and our evaluation centers around lukewarm, e.g. good at straightforward, junior level tasks, or good for prototyping, or good for initially generating tests, or good for answering certain types of questions, or good for one-off scripts, but approximately none of them would trust these LLMs to implement a more complex feature like a mid-level or senior developer would without very extensive guidance and hand-holding that takes longer than just doing it ourselves.

Given the overwhelming absence of evidence, the most charitable conclusion I can come to is that the vast majority of people making these claims have simply gone from being 0.2X developers to being 0.3X developers who happen to generate 5X more code per unit of time.

[1] e.g. my reply to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45651948

[ssk42]

Context engineering is a critical part of being able to use the tool. And it's ok to not understand how to use a new tool. The different models combined with different stacks require different ways of grappling with the technology. And it all changes! It sucks that you've tried it for your stack (Elixir, whatever that is) in your way and it was disappointing.

To me, the tool inherently makes sense and vibes with my own personality. It allows me to write code that I would otherwise procrastinate on. It allows me to turn ideas into reality, so much faster.

Maybe you're just hyper focused on metrics? Productivity, especially when dealing with code, is hard to quanitfy. This is a new paradigm and so it's also hard to compare apples to oranges. Does this help?

[dns_snek]

So your take is that every real software developer I know is simply bad at using this magical tool that performs on the level of mid-senior level software engineer in the hands of a few chosen ones? But the chosen ones never build anything in public where it can be observed, evaluated, and critiqued. How unfortunate is that?

The people I talked to use a wide variety of environments and their experience is similar across the board, whether they're working in Nodejs, React, Vue, Ruby, PHP, Java, Elixir, or Python.

> Productivity, especially when dealing with code, is hard to quanitfy.

Indeed, that's why I think most people claiming these obscene benefits are really bad at evaluating their own performance and/or started from a really low baseline.

I always think back to a study I read a while ago where people without ADHD were given stimulant medication and reported massive improvements in productivity but objective measurements showed that their real-world performance was equal to, or slightly lower than their baseline.

I think it's very relevant to the psychology behind this AI worship. Some people are being elevated from a low baseline whilst others are imagining the benefits.

[hattmall]

I'm not saying it is, but if ANYTHING was the exact combination of prerequisites to be considered paid promotion on HN, this is the type of comment it would be.

[hluska]

So, let’s see if I get this straight. A highly identifiable person whose company sells a security product is the ideal shill? That doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. On the other hand, someone with a different opinion makes complete sense.

[hattmall]

Lebron James endorses KIA. Multi-billion dollar companies can afford and benefit from highly identifiable people so I don't really think that argument makes it any less likely to be an endorsement.