In my experience GPT-5.2 with extra-high thinking is consistently a bit better and significantly cheaper (even when I use the Fast version which is 2x the price in Cursor).

The HN obsession with Claude Code might be a bit biased by people trying to justify their expensive subscriptions to themselves.

However, Opus 4.5 is much faster and very high quality too, and that ends up mattering more in practice. I end up using it much more and paying a dear but worthwhile price for it.

PS: Despite what the benchmarks say, I find Gemini 3 Pro and Flash to be a step below Claude and GPT, although still great compared to the state-of-the-art last year, and very fast and cheap. Gemini also seems to have a less AI sounding writing-style.

I am aware this is all quite vague and anecdotal, just my two cents.

I do think these kinds of opinions are valuable. Benchmarks are a useful reference, but they do give the illusion of certainty to something that is fundamentally much harder to measure and quite subjective.

Better, yes, but cheaper - only when looking at API costs I guess? Who in their right mind uses the API instead of the subsidized plans? There, Opus is way cheaper in terms of subsidized tokens.

You are using opus via api? 200$/mo is nothing for what I get for it so not sure how it is considered expensive. I guess it is how you it; I hit the limits every day. Using the API, I would indeed be paying through the nose but why would anyone?

My experience exactly.