[willaaam]

Hey! Didn't mean my comment negatively towards you in any way, though I now realize it might've come across as such. Blogs with opinions based on experiences alone are absolutely fine, thanks for sharing.

What I did mean is to indicate that your blog felt like a HN comment to me, where I generally expect a HN link to be news or facts that subsequently spark a discussion.

At the end of your post I guess I was hoping or expecting facts or examples, indicating it was engaging enough to read to the end.

Happy holidays!

[mergesort]

No problem at all! I read it as a bit pithy, but I didn’t think it was particularly mean spirited.

If you check out my writing on build.ms and fabisevi.ch you’ll see that the majority of it is meant to be evergreen observations of a concept or a moment in time. My goal is to make people think and to think about thinking, more than it is to tell people what exactly to think.

If I had to summarize my style in one sentence, it would walking people to and around an idea, and leaving the rest as an exercise to the reader. Naturally, this means I have less control over how people interpret my writing so I do try and cover my bases with fact and experience, but that still means sometimes I won’t deliver a complete picture to everyone.

In that case, sometimes I come to a place like HN or Bluesky or Mastodon where my post is being discussed and try add some perspective and clarity through constructive conversation. :)

If I’m being honest, I think we’re too early in the state of generative AI as a coding tool to draw very strong factual conclusions for many of our experiences using AI to code that will hold up well. I’m not implying it’s all vibes, but I think it would be pretty hard to wrap up my post in a bow the way you’re suggesting. On the other hand I’m always open to well-considered feedback — and would love to know more about your experience if you’re interested in sharing!

That’s a long way of saying happy holidays to you as well!

[willaaam]

Most of my AI coding experience is through Github Copilot (GHCP), mostly because that is available to me professionally. GHCP has improved greatly over the past half year in my opinion. I do use it a lot, burning up my enterprise allowance almost every month working on complex python codebases.

When it comes to models in GHCP, I vastly prefer Claude over Codex. It's not that Codex is bad, it just feels tonedeaf to me. It writes code in its own preferred style and doesn't adjust to the context of the codebase. Additionally, for me, Sonnet and Opus are much less prone to getting stuck in loops for longer or more complex agentic tasks.

I do like Codex for review tasks. When I'm working on something complex, both planning and implementation, I frequently ask Codex to review Claude's work, and it does a good job at that, frequently catching a mistake or coming up with a different angle.

I've toyed with kilocode, cline and the related forks through Claude Opus 4.5 API, but I'd argue my experience with Claude Sonnet/Opus through Copilot has just been... better. More consistent. Faster.

Sometimes I code with local models, when I'm working on highly confidential projects or data. Prefer GPT-OSS 20b or Qwen3-coder-30b then, but without an agentic harness as prompts get big and slow.

I would find it a nice read to work a case and see two models/harnesses duke it out, see whether it matches your expectations and gut feeling.