Hacker News Reader

Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

At some point one has to wonder if it's still worth using anthropic's models if we need to babysit 100% of its output with another vendor's model. Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

I can't help but feel the circumstances that enable this kind of front page article are vestigial from the days when OAI was super bad and Anthropic was beyond reproach. This change-over-time is why I avoid getting tribal with technology vendors. Assigning ideological motives to 200k+ employee organizations is how we wind up in weird contortions like this.

Most rational actors simply moved from one to the other. It takes a special kind of devotion to the proverbial hole in the ground to keep pushing in this direction.

View on HN

> Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

Effectively all models can do style transfer reasonably well at this point, but not so much for "actual reasoning".

If the combination of two works better for you than each one by itself, why wouldn't you stack them like that?

Wash, Rinse,,, Repeat?

whats going on is openai and anthropic have tons of garbage in their system prompts "don't talk about goblins" so your ability to override that garbage is nearly wiped out. This is "alignment" and I'm pretty sure both orgs have convinced themselves that this benefits the customer.

So here's the workflow I gathered, from the comments I've read here recently:

- Claude as main agent, but use this skill[0] to make Claude delegate everything to Codex, because it's cheaper and faster. (Hilariously, the skill is official!)

- Use TFA or Claudish to English[1] so the final output is actually human readable.

Ironically it wasn't so long ago that I was asking Claude to rewrite output from other LLMs to make it more readable...

[0] - https://github.com/openai/codex-plugin-cc

[1] - https://github.com/gvzdv/claudish-to-english

> Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

Because it's not an either or thing. Neither is sufficient. I'd argue that, expenses aside, you should have every model you have access to cross reviewing the work of the others.

Outside of super trivial things that I should have just done myself, I have a cross-model review of _everything_ these days. The tokens are too cheap not to.

> Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

This is what I think too. But, users’ psychology might be playing a role here. Anthropic has great advantage from being the first major player delivering functional agentic coding solution (rather than an intelligent autocomplete) and they were able to impress people by Opus’ iterative improvements early this year.

It’s technically very easy to switch between models, harnesses but their moat or perhaps a main source of users’ friction could be FOMO. That’s especially powerful in this competitive environment where everyone keeps wondering/worrying about what others might be doing to get or stay ahead.

That depends on the output's purpose: if the purpose is to produce readable text for a human that is _not_ me, like an article or document, then I care more about clarity, plain-speaking, and general register. If the goal is to accomplish a specific task, I don't care as much about the prose quality: I'll put up with "Honest Framings" and "load-bearing" since it seems to me that's the token that needs to be in the context for it to function.

I've been in the habit of pushing my claude-speak to codex to improve legibility, but only if I think someone is going to read it.

>Why not just use that other vendor's model for everything?

On the SMB side, you can find yourself with enough money for a Claude subscription (which generally provides a really good $/token value) but limited other options (compliance paperwork, cost, finance, legal)

Personally I wouldn't bother with Anthropic at home but at work it's one of the most cost-effective options that keeps data in the U.S. (which our U.S. customers tend to want)

individuals can blow in the wind, but if you are a company who bought a thousand seats and spent a ton of time training people up, establishing policies, vetting which extensions are allowed, the transition cost is much higher.

Sol is like this too...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com