[xnx]

> Google somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of success

This is still very early days. Who is "on top" has flipped back and forth many times already. The next frontier model release (from whomever) will change things again.

[Eridrus]

I don't think it's that early tbh, agentic coding has ~90% adoption in the US.

Claude Code has largely won individual developer mindshare and has been on top ever since it came out. The benchmarks change, but almost nobody opts to use anything other than Claude IME when I ask them. Enterprise is more competitive since they care about costs and other things, but developers leaning towards Claude puts a thumb on the scales there.

The product doesn't have much lock in, so it is possible to dislodge Claude, and Anthropic could (and some may argue is likely to) just shoot themselves in the foot again and again and again, but Google has never been particularly good at enterprise sales, and they have never actually been at the frontier of intelligence.

I think Google's incentives have mostly about building models for their products, which makes them focus more on the cheap end, and while they need that, it feels like the Innovator's Dilemma is biting them here.

I own a lot of Google stock from working there in the past and have been quite happy about their trajectory up until the last 6 months, but I am getting pretty antsy about their AI story these days.

[sdesol]

> Claude Code has largely won individual developer mindshare and has been on top ever since it came out.

Claude Code's success is not due to the agent but because the model is considered the best for programming and is very heavily subsidized, compared to pay as you go API prices. Consumers and Enterprise are not really locked in and will go where it makes the most sense.

I think they have almost no loyalty by actual developers.

[Eridrus]

This isn't a perfect survey, but I am a Codex user and most of my employees are pretty stuck in their workflows and were not really interested in trying even when I was saying good things (even pre-Opus 4.8).

When we work trial people, 100% of people ask for Claude rather than Codex or anything else.

When I talk to people at non-AI tech events everyone basically says they use Claude and have not tried an alternative.

Developers writ large are actually not that interested in trying multiple tools, they like customizing their chosen tool and tweaking it forever.

I think developers are as susceptible to brand marketing as everyone else. It's why almost everyone has a Macbook.

[Foobar8568]

There is no reason to be loyal....There is no moat.

Basically you may choose to drink brand A water bottle, brand B water bottle or tap water. Oh and you might choose the glass water bottle if you use API/Fable.

[gehsty]

There’s no reason to be loyal, but I guess it’s a bit like any tool, once you get used to how one works why would you change to another? There is some stickiness with an LLM + harness.

[lerchmo]

Exactly developers can switch to another coding cli and the learning curve is close to zero. Mindshare without switching costs is just a popsicle in the sun.

[reinitctxoffset]

Claude Code (or any other model/infra/harness co-design) is not subsidized in any normal use of that word. It's trough filling (I've written this up in lurid detail so I'm only going to do it again if anyone cares).

It's not true, it's just a play for margin.

[satvikpendem]

Nah, these harnesses like Claude Code and Codex are very sticky, I don't see many coworkers switching often, as they have set workflows for their particular harness. It's like vim and emacs, once you pick one it's unlikely you'd switch especially as the models are all "good enough" by now.

[baq]

Every model has its strengths and weaknesses, being loyal is suboptimal unless you mean being loyal to all of them, which is why cursor would have been well positioned before it got acquired. Now you have to jump through hoops to call Gemini from Claude from codex. Yuck.

[kelvinjps10]

Claude code was one of the first agentic code tool and when openai release models similar in performance they didn't do as well in their tools (now codex)

[draebek]

> I don't think it's that early tbh, agentic coding has ~90% adoption in the US.

Where does that 90% figure come from?

[Eridrus]

I pulled it out of my ass based on anecdotes of talking to engineers and customers, but actual surveys back this up as well with numbers from 84-91%: https://www.digitalapplied.com/blog/ai-coding-adoption-stati...

[piyh]

Early days or not, Google fucking deleted my IDE and wiped my settings. It took them days to roll out a fix, by which point I had migrated off Antigravity.

[onion2k]

I don't think that's true if the reason a company has left the vendor for given model by making it hard to buy. Enterprise IT is enough of a pain in the butt that people will forego the new shiny to avoid the old painful unless it's genuinely better. As you say though, the best frontier model flips regularly, so companies won't go through the hassle of deploying a model if it's proved horrible to do in the past. They'll just skip that model because their current one is fine.

[noodlescb]

I guess? Maybe I'm alone here but I don't feel like Fable is particularly more useful than Sonnet most of the time. I feel like the LLMs are good enough for the majority of uses and the hyper expensive premium ones are way into diminishing returns. At this point with Kimi being as good as it is, if they jack up the price any more I'll just go open source.

[creshal]

Model quality is only one aspect, the bigger problem is making it work in a fully integrated enterprise platform, and Google has always been lacking when it came to the latter.

At this rate, if Google has a flagship model, you're better off plugging it into a competitor's tooling than hope Google figures out how to use it.