Hacker News Reader

Comment by swalsh | Hacker News Reader

As a user, I basically just care about a minimum baseline of competence... which most models do well enough on. But then I want the model to "just give me the code". I switched to Claude, and canceled my chatgpt subscription because the amount of placeholders and just general "laziness" in chatgpt was terrible.

Using Claude was a breath of fresh air. I asked for some code, I got the entire code.

View on HN

I’ve been using Claude 3 Opus for a while now and was fairly happy with the results. Wouldn’t say they were better than GPT-4, but considerably less verbose which I really appreciated. Recently though I ran into two questions I had that Claude actually answered incorrectly and incompletely until I prompted it. One was a Java GC questions where is forgot Epsilon and then hallucinated that is wasn’t experimental anymore. The other was a coding question where I know there wouldn’t be a good answer, but Claude kept repeating a previous answer even though I had twice told it that it wasn’t what I was looking for.

So I’ve switched back to GPT-4 again for a the time being to see if I’m happier with the results. I never felt that Claude 3 Opus measurably better than GPT-4 to begin with.

I just run a system message around my coding exercises to provide minimal explanations and be concise.

Same here -- one or two sentences along those lines in GPT-4's system prompt makes a _world_ of difference.

Agreed and from a pure ChatGPT perspective the way to go is creating your personal "GPTs" (I hate the name of the product) that are simply system message wrappers. So I will have a Coding GPT, and email GPT etc.

Claude is a bit more expensive though, no? I felt like I burned through 5$ worth of credit in one evening, but perhaps it was also because I was using the big-AGI UI and it was producing diagrams for me, often in quintuplicates for some reason. Still, I really like Claude and much more prefer it over others.

I'm not using the API. Both are $20/month subscriptions.

What were the placeholders and laziness? I just ended my prompts with something akin to "give me the full code and nothing else" and ChatGPT does exactly that. How does Claude do any better?

Even if I ask in caps it often comment out large pieces of code. I often give large pieces of code and ask for adjustments. Then I don’t want to have to search & only copy paste the small adjustments of gpt. But it never listens

I sympathize but amusingly I have the opposite problem. Most of the time I want it to output a full script, and it only wants to output a small block with changes unless I plead with it to include everything.

That's what I mean

Reply on news.ycombinator.com