Claude Review

You can read my review of Phind, another LLM tool, here.

For the past several weeks, I’ve been using Claude Opus (the paid version of Anthropic’s ChatGPT competitor).

For the first time, I think ChatGPT has been outclassed.

For context, I use Claude for help coding (you can read about my process for coding with GPTs here), for understanding new-to-me technical concepts, and for marketing, business, and technical writing.

Here’s what I like about Claude:

• It feels smarter. I’m not sure exactly how to quantify this, except to say it’s like when you sync slightly better with one coworker than another. On coding projects, I notice fewer suggestions that lead me down a dead end or that add unnecessary scope.
• It has less of a heavy tone on writing. I feel like ChatGPT gives me decent feedback on my writing, but when I ask it to write for me, it feels like it has been written by ChatGPT (some hallmarks: excessive excitement, over explaining). This is fine in some cases, but in others, I end up having to remove the ChatGPT-ness of it.

With that said, Claude has some pretty big limitations:

• Just 5 images per chat is a crime. Screenshots of error messages is the default now.
• I really miss the context I’ve been able to add to my own customGPT for my coding project. It’s not a lot of extra information, but having the LLM know my basic directory structure saves a lot of extra messages.
• If there is a way to stop a message, edit it, and resend it, I haven’t found it yet in ~3 weeks of daily usage.

Despite all these limitations, given the choice between which one to work with, I am consistently choosing Claude. I wonder what this says about the stickiness of these tools?

Now for the ultimate test: have I cancelled my ChatGPT subscription yet?

No, but for an unexpected reason: the ChatGPT mobile app. I’ve been having voice conversations with ChatGPT mobile, both personally when there’s a topic I want to dig into, and increasingly with my daughter. We pick a topic she’s interested in (e.g., where do dinosaurs come from) and just riff on it. It’s perfect for a curious toddler — she can keep asking questions over and over again. I think this is what Tyler Cowen means when he says creators are competing with LLMs for attention.

We’ll see how long this lasts — I don’t expect that I will continue keeping two LLM subscriptions forever. Hurry up and add a mobile app, Claude team!

2024-03-25