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Switch to Claude without starting over

claude.com

51–60 of 287 posts

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#51
post #13

I already switched to claude a while ago. Didn’t bring along any context, just switched subscriptions, walked away from chatgpt and haven’t touched it again. Turned out to be a non-event, there really is no moat. I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I’m pretty sure t…

> there really is no moat. For ChatGPT and Gemini, yes. But for Claude, they have a very deep & big one: Its the only model that gets production ready output on the first detailled prompt. Yesterday I used my tokens til noon, so I tried some output from Gemini & Co. I presented a working piece of code which is already in production: 1. It changed without noticing things like "Touple.First.Date.Created" and "Touple.Se…

> But for Claude, they have a very deep & big one: Its the only model that gets production ready output on the first detailled promp

That's not a moat though. Claude itself wasn't there 6 months ago and there's no reason to think Chinese open models won't be at this level in a year at most.

To keep its current position Claude has to keep improving at the same pace as the competitor.

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#52
post #50

If Claude could stay available I might consider it. Unfortunately right now, out of the big three, only Gemini has reliable uptime. As much as I dislike Google it's the only reliable option.

I dont like the Gemini's personality. It acts like it know it all.

I agree, it's definitely attempting to gaslight us all.

I find I need to explain I know what I'm talking about first before it gives me non-patronising answers.

It definitely advertises Google services and I would say I hate it. But it's just reliably available. Neither Claude nor ChatGPT are responding at all today.

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#53
I tried all of Codex, OpenCode, Claude Code and Cursor these past few weeks. It was surprising to me that all of them have slightly different conventions for where to put skills, how to format MCP servers (how environment variables need to be specified etc), what the AGENTS/CLAUDE file needs to be called, what plugins/marketplaces are...it's a big mess for anyone trying to have a portable config in their dotfiles that can universally apply to any current and future agent.

It also showed me the difference between expectation and reality...even though these are billion dollar companies, they still haven't figured out how to make lag-free TUIs, non-Electron apps, or even respect XDG_CONFIG. The focus is definitely more on speed and stuffing these tools full of new discoveries and features right now

There's a bit of psychology around models vs. harnesses as well. You can't shake off the feeling that maybe Claude would perform better in its native harness compared to VSCode/OpenCode. Especially because they've got so many hidden skills (like the recently introduced /batch), that seem baked into the binary?

The last thing I can't figure out is computer use. Apparently all the vendors say that their models can use a mouse and keyboard, but outside of the agent-browser skill (which presumably uses playwright), I can't figure out what the special sauce is that the Cloud versions of these Agents are using to exercise programs in a VM. That is another reason why there is a switching cost between vendors.

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#55
This method of copying an LLM-generated summary of your preferences into Claude memory feels similar to their recommendation to use /init to generate a CLAUDE.md based on the project, which recent research[0] suggests may be counterproductive.

I would assume both Claude memory and CLAUDE.md work best when they're carefully curated, only containing what you've found yourself having to repeat.

[0]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11988

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#56
post #48
post #13

I already switched to claude a while ago. Didn’t bring along any context, just switched subscriptions, walked away from chatgpt and haven’t touched it again. Turned out to be a non-event, there really is no moat. I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I’m pretty sure t…

[flagged]

> I swear HN is just a bunch of fanboys full of NPC behavior.

Why are you assuming these are real people and not NPCs?

The amount of money flowing around AI is staggering. To believe that the AI companies aren't flooding all the social media zones with propaganda is disingenuous.

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#57
post #13

I already switched to claude a while ago. Didn’t bring along any context, just switched subscriptions, walked away from chatgpt and haven’t touched it again. Turned out to be a non-event, there really is no moat. I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I’m pretty sure t…

> there really is no moat. For ChatGPT and Gemini, yes. But for Claude, they have a very deep & big one: Its the only model that gets production ready output on the first detailled prompt. Yesterday I used my tokens til noon, so I tried some output from Gemini & Co. I presented a working piece of code which is already in production: 1. It changed without noticing things like "Touple.First.Date.Created" and "Touple.Se…

I have used Claude (incl. Opus 4.6) fairly extensively, and Claude still spits out quality that is far below what I would call production ready - both littered with smaller issues, but also the occasional larger blunder. Particularly when doing anything non-trivial, and even when guiding it in detail (although that admittedly reduces the amount of larger structural issues).

Maybe it is tech stack dependent (I have mostly used it with C#/.NET), but I have heard people say the same for C#. The only conclusion I have been able to draw from this, is that people have very different definitions of production ready, but I would really like to see some concrete evidence where Claude one-shots a larger/complex C# feature or the like (with or without detailed guidance).

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#58
post #13

I already switched to claude a while ago. Didn’t bring along any context, just switched subscriptions, walked away from chatgpt and haven’t touched it again. Turned out to be a non-event, there really is no moat. I switched not because I thought Claude was better at doing the things I want. I switched because I have come to believe OpenAI are a bad actor and I do not want to support them in any way. I’m pretty sure t…

> there really is no moat. For ChatGPT and Gemini, yes. But for Claude, they have a very deep & big one: Its the only model that gets production ready output on the first detailled prompt. Yesterday I used my tokens til noon, so I tried some output from Gemini & Co. I presented a working piece of code which is already in production: 1. It changed without noticing things like "Touple.First.Date.Created" and "Touple.Se…

> Its the only model that gets production ready output on the first detailled prompt. Yesterday I used my tokens til noon, so I tried some output from Gemini & Co. I presented a working piece of code which is already in production:

One does often hear that where LLMs shine is with greenfield code generation but they all start to struggle working with pre-existing code. It could be that this wasn't a like for like comparison.

That said I do personally feel Claude to produce far better results than competitors.

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#59
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> there really is no moat. For ChatGPT and Gemini, yes. But for Claude, they have a very deep & big one: Its the only model that gets production ready output on the first detailled prompt. Yesterday I used my tokens til noon, so I tried some output from Gemini & Co. I presented a working piece of code which is already in production: 1. It changed without noticing things like "Touple.First.Date.Created" and "Touple.Se…

That's been my experience too. I'm using the recent free trial of OpenAI Plus to vibe code, and from this I would say that if Claude Code is a junior with 1-3 years of experience, OpenAI's Codex is like a student coder.

Does it depend on what type of programming you do? Doing Swift/SwiftUI work, I have exactly the opposite experience. I’ve been using both recently, and I want to use Claude alone (especially after the last week’s events), but Codex is just so much faster and better.

Re: Switch to Claude without starting over

#60
At least as an EU user I was also able to export ALL my data, audio files images etc in one zip. Took exactly (on the minute) 24 hours for the download link to arrive but hey.

This way you can have Claude distill the memory as you wish.

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