Yup, OP is conflating so many things that the comparison has all the scientific rigor of the Pepsi Challenge.

For a developer using an LLM on a daily basis, the experience is about much more than just the resultant code.

There’s everything from:

- how often you had to manually steer the model

- how frequently you needed to course-correct

- how much detail you had to provide up front

- how was the interaction process (sycophantic, etc)

- how well did it handle MCP and external tooling?

- how effectively could it pull in additional information from external sources such as the web?

- how fast did it produce code?

- how much did it cost?

Many of my friends who are devs use things like OpenCode CLI with Openrouter because they switch between the various SOTA models so often. Just because you saw a Claude "meetup" doesn't prove anything other than somebody chose the name because it resonated more than "Generic LLM Meetup".