I do think Claude Code as a tool gave Anthropic some advantages over others. They have plan mode, todolist, askUserQuestion tools, hooks, etc., which greatly extend Opus's capabilities. Agree that others (Codex, Cursor) also quickly copy these features, but this is the nature of the race, and Anthropic has to keep innovating to maintain its edge over others

The biggest advantage by far is the data they collect along the way. Data that can be bucketed to real devs and signals extracted from this can be top tier. All that data + signals + whatever else they cook can be re-added in the training corpus and the models re-trained / version++ on the new set. Rinse and repeat.

(this is also why all the labs, including some chinese ones, are subsidising / metoo-ing coding agents)