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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Even before this release the tools (for me: Claude Code and Gemini for other stuff) reached a "good enough" plateau that means any other company is going to have a hard time making me (I think soon most users) want to switch. Unless a new release from a different company has a real paradigm shift, they're simply sufficient. This was not true in 2023/2024 IMO.

With this release the "good enough" and "cheap enough" intersect so hard that I wonder if this is an existential threat to those other companies.

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Why wouldn't you switch? The cost to switch is near zero for me. Some tools have built in model selectors. Direct CLI/IDE plug-ins practically the same UI.

Not OP, but I feel the same way. Cost is just one of the factor. I'm used to Claude Code UX, my CLAUDE.md works well with my workflow too. Unless there's any significant improvement, changing to new models every few months is going to hurt me more.

I used to think this way. But I moved to AGENTS.md. Now I use the different UI as a mental context separation. Codex is working on Feature A, Gemini on feature B, Claude on Feature C. It has become a feature.

You're assuming that different models need the same stuff in AGENTS.md

In my experience, to get the best performance out of different models, they need slightly different prompting.

just switch to Opencode and stop locking yourself into a particular providers way of doing things.

There's a plugin for everything that mimics anything the others are doing

Being open does not magically make everything better. People are willing to pay for Claude Code for many valid reasons. You are also assuming I have never used OpenCode, which is incorrect. Claude is simply my preference.

I see all of these tools as IDEs. Whether someone locks into VS Code, JetBrains, Neovim, or Sublime Text comes down to personal preference. Everyone works differently, and that is completely fine.

I use claude on opencode.

I'm not sure you even understand what opencode is.

Does that mean that you also don't switch to newer Anthropic models? Because they would change similarly, wouldn't they?

I think a big part of the switching cost is the cost of learning a different model's nuances. Having good intuition for what works/doesn't, how to write effective prompts, etc.

Maybe someday future models will all behave similarly given the same prompt, but we're not quite there yet

Because some people are restricted by company policy to only use providers with which they have a legally binding agreement to not use their chats as training data.

For me, the last wave of models finally started delivering on their agentic coding promises.

This has been my experience exactly. Even over just the last few weeks I’ve noticed a dramatic drop in having to undo what the agents have done.

But for me the previous models were routinely wrong time wasters that overall added no speed increase taking the lottery of whether they'd be correct into account.

Correct. Opus 4.5 'solved' software engineering. What more do I need? Businesses need uncapped intelligence, and that is a very high bar. Individuals often don't.

If Opus is one-size-fits-all, then why Claude keeps the other series? (rethorical).

Opus and Sonnet are slower than Haiku. For lots of less sophisticated tasks, you benefit from the speed.

All vendors do this. You need smaller models that you can rapid-fire for lots of other reasons than vibe coding.

Personally, I actually use more smaller models than the sophisticated ones. Lots of small automations.

Yes, all the major CLIs (Claude Code, Codex, etc) and many agentic applications use a large model main agent with task delegation to small model sub-agent. For example in CC using Opus4.5 it will delegate an Explore task to a Haiku/Sonnet subagent or multiple subagents.

The agent interfaces are for human interaction. Some tasks can be fully unattended though. For those, I find smaller models more capable due to their speed.

Think beyond interfaces. I'm talking about rapid-firing hundreds of small agents and having zero human interaction with them. The feedback is deterministic (non agentic) and automated too.

> What more do I need?

Much cheaper price and much faster token generation.

At least, that's what I need. I stopped using Anthropic because for their $20 a month offering, I get rate limited constantly, but for Gemini $20/month I've never even once hit a limit.

I asked a similar question yesterday:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46290797

I just can't stop thinking though about the vulnerability of training data

You say good enough. Great, but what if I as a malicious person were to just make a bunch of internet pages containing things that are blatantly wrong, to trick LLMs?

The internet has already tried this, for about a few decades. The garbage is in the corpus; it gets weighted as such

>a bunch of internet pages containing things that are blatantly wrong

So Reddit?

I’d imagine the AI companies have all the “pre AI internet” data they scraped very carefully catalogued.

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