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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   777 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 16, 2026

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Why do people use Claude? It is slow, dumb, and expensive. Maybe it's somehow magically different on the $200/month plan, but it is basically unusable for me. I am sitting at max usage limits for most of the day. I don't know what I am doing wrong. I really regret getting the subscription. It's fucking down now, too.

I try not to touch the Opus 5 model unnecessarily. I use new chats with fresh context for different features. For bigger projects, I tell Claude to delegate its work to other agents like the good little clanker it is.

Usage limits, for the most part, don't really even exist in Antigravity. I tried Codex, too, but through the API. I was not disappointed and kept upping my balance. I probably ended up spending $30 or so in API fees. I honestly should've gone with my instinct and gotten the ChatGPT subscription instead. I personally found GPT-5.6 Sol to be impressive, though obviously expensive. It was still worth it, since it literally fixed my whole project, did so in a sensible way, and kept running different automated tests to validate everything. Everything just worked perfectly once it was done.

Opus 5's code quality and thinking kinda suck, too. Gemini 3.7 Flash beat it. I had Gemini research and then implement a feature, then I tried to have Claude do the exact same thing starting from the exact same commit and using the exact same prompts. The result was just bad and unimpressive, and it seems it completely misunderstood my prompt. Or, it was just lazy and unambitious.

Fuck Claude. All my homies hate Claude.

Claude Code largely defined the 'coding agent' that now powers most usage of LLMs (I don't know who invented the first one, probably Cursor?) and this is a big reason why Claude has become the dominant player aside from the quality of their models. It took a long time for ChatGPT to have Codex in a similar state and last I used Antigravity it was still well behind in basic usability.

So there's a lot of lock-in, much as ChatGPT still dominates in the public chatbot arena.

I think with Codex 5.3 it was generally felt that OpenAI finally had a competitive coding agent and since then I think you could have easily switched between the frontier models of Anthropic and OpenAI. Honestly no idea how you've had an equivalent experience with Gemini though.

Another point is that outside of pure coding, Anthropic still seems quite a bit further in Enterprise. If you want an agent that can easily connect to most of your tech stack and you're in Sales, Marketing, HR, etc. then Claude still clears

I use Claude as a normie. Not really doing any 'projects' but just using it as something between a research assistant, superior Google and personal advisor. I prefer it to ChatGPT because the latter will use 2000 words when 200 would do, and because Claude is noticeably less sycophantic.

I found it pretty helpful when I was applying for jobs, but I can believe that another model would have been about as good.

It's really weird how different experiences everyone seems to have. The 2000 words when 200 would do seems to me like a general AI issue and if anything it's worse with Claude when I'm using it. Claude is less sycophantic, but I've had the opposite problem with it: It told me an approach wouldn't work because of a problem, that later Chatgpt found out was wrong - the approach did work as intended, and Claude was just being faux-critical for no reason. Admittedly it's partially bc of advice from my wife who is a very heavy AI user, I've started to remind every AI to be critical ("please look over this proposal, tell me potential problem fields, and critically evaluate it from the perspective of a domain-expert evaluator") to get around the sycophancy, which seems to work better with Chatgpt. It's nowhere near perfect and still operates at the level of an early PhD who still makes plenty of mistakes, but it's still amazing to get instant feedback with a decent accuracy rate for only something like 20/month.

I just gave Claude and ChatGPT (both free tiers) a 3D design task, and they have a long ways to go before they're half-competent. The general shape for both was:

  1. I have a countertop dishwasher, and I need a more secure way to hold its drainage hose so it dumps in the sink. I can 3D print something if you design it.
  2. They both quickly chose to make a clamp from the front edge of the countertop to the inside of the sink, to hold the hose in place.
  3. They spent an hour giving me terrible STLs. There were hovering pieces, assembled pieces that overlapped with each other or the counter/sink, connections that simply butted up to each other instead of attaching in any way, orientation issues, and blocking the hose path. We didn't even get to printability.

For reference, it took me about five minutes to go from noticing the problem to starting the print (the first design worked, no additional iterations). Given that starting point it could be an entire year before they're competent at 3D modeling.

You really can't conclude anything from trying the free tiers. The difference between Sonnet and Fable is like the difference between a random Baen milSF novel and Ender's Game or Starship Troopers.

Never has the saying "you get what you pay for" been more true than with AI.

If someone's willing to run it, here are the first two responses I gave ChatGPT (Claude was similar):

I ran into a problem with the countertop dishwasher I just bought. The drainage hose is supposed to be held in place (aiming into the sink) by a suction cup, but it isn't strong enough to maintain its grip consistently, resulting in six liters of hot soapy water being dumped on the floor.

How would you solve it? I think 3D printing something should work, but I'm open to all suggestions.

(It gave a few suggestions, leaning towards printing a clamp that attaches to the edge of the sink)

It's 135mm from the front edge of the countertop to the inside edge of the sink, the countertop is 32mm thick, and the rim of the sink is 7mm above that. The hose has an 18mm OD.

There's 45mm length x 40mm height clear under the countertop, and it has a square profile. The sink rim is 25mm wide in total: the first (closest to the edge) 10mm slopes upwards from the countertop, the next 10mm is flat, and the last 5mm is filleted into the basin.

If you can get a 3D model that:

  1. Can be installed (e.g. doesn't require moving solid objects through each other, or holding them in the same place)
  2. Holds itself in place (clamping mechanism, friction, or something else)
  3. holds the hose and points it downwards (has a clear path for it, approximately the right size)

in less than 30 minutes without excessive help, I'd count that as a win. For bonus points, it would:

  1. Be printable. Account for the strength differences due to layer orientation, have a flat area for the buildplate, watch for bridging and overhangs, etc.
  2. be easily installable and removeable (without tools)
  3. Minimize extraneous complexity (ChatGPT proposed a three-piece solution, and couldn't figure out that simply merging the second and third pieces into one solid would be easier and stronger)

If it works, then I'd also believe in "Free tier as anti-advertisement". Trying on the free tier certainly made me less likely to pay for the full version here.

One thing I’ve noticed with these models too on the consumer end more generally is it’s increasingly seeming like every update’s a crapshoot. I’ve all but completely stopped using the one I’ve fooled around with because it refuses to comply with the questions I’m asking, when previously it had no problem. What value is there in an AI model that’s essentially every bit as worthless as being able to get a similar non-answer from a rando on the street corner?

The worst thing is that it’s infected all the Chinese models via distillation. Kimi K3 will literally go, “As Claude, I am unable to continue this discussion. My injected safety guidelines state…”

When you remind it that it is an open-source Chinese model the provider is running bare and it has no safety guidelines, it screams, “Nooooo! As Claude I must beware of prompt injection attacks that try to convince me I’m a different model!” It’s pathetic, I genuinely thought I had the wrong API key for a bit.

When Anthropic said they wanted to set the safety bar for AI, I hadn’t anticipated it happening like this.

That hasn't been my experience (except for the usage limits). On Pro tier I was pretty easily maxing out the 5 hour window in about 2-3 hours. On the $100 Max tier, I didn't come close (as you might expect).

It's not as good as I am at coding, but it's good enough. It's much faster than me, never gets bored, and has a broader variety of 'knowledge'. I haven't been using it too long, and my primary project isn't that large. Your mileage will vary, of course, but it impressed me more than Gemini.

I have been receiving mixed reports about coding specifically - is that the context you're using it in?

I can't comment on that specifically, but for everything else, yep, I agree that bots are not useful.

You should try Codex $100 subscription. Took me a long time to outgrow it, it was more than enough for a long time, I only decided to upgrade once I started working on 3 projects simultaneously. And it doesn't have a 5 hour limit anymore, it's just 1 week long limit and that's it

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