What is the secret sauce of Claude Code that makes it, somewhat irrespective of the backend LLM, better than the competition?

Is it just better prompting? Better tooling?

The agentic instructions just seem to be better. It does stuff by default (such as working up a plan of action) that other agents need to be prompted for, and it seems to get stuck less in failure sinks. The actual Claude model is decent, but claude code is probably the best agentic tool out there right now.

tbh, claude code is the only product that feels like its made by people who have actually used AI tooling on legacy codebases

for pretty much every other tool i've used, you walk away from it with the overwhelming feeling that whoever made this has never actually worked at a company in a software engineering team before

i realize this isn't an answer with satisfactory evidence-based language. but I do believe that there's a core `product-focus` difference between claude with other tools

Claude's edge comes from its superior context handling (up to 200K tokens), better tool use capabilities, and constitutional AI training that reduces hallucinations in code generation.