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Comment by ngruhn | Hacker News Reader

I'm switching to GPT because of this. The prose is so much more legible. The only reason I keep using Claude Code is because the harness is the best IMO.

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Your point on the harness is interesting. How do you distinguish characteristics of the model from characteristics of the harness?

In the early days I feel it was more apparent. You would frequently see the model making failed tool calls etc.. but now that feels so rare. I'm not confident I can perceive whatever shortcomings of the harness remain.

Bit of a tangent but at work we have GitHub Copilot and the VSCode harness is somehow night and day better than whatever happens in the IntelliJ plugin. Aside from having better features, for some reason prompts seem to be cheaper as well.

I'm not talking about model performance. I just mean the UX of Claude Code. I'm trying to use pi but there are so many paper cuts. Of course you can configure everything but that's a ton of work. Claude Code has pretty good defaults.

I was the same until I ran out of Anthropic tokens one day and used "Grok Build" which is their Claude Code clone. You can use config to point it any LLM API so don't need to use Grok, and I like the UI better too.

I'm not sure I could really live down using something branded with Grok but it makes sense Elon Musk at least shipped user facing products in the past, not surprised his company delivered something more usable.

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