Yes. That is a salesperson. The next-step is to drive engagement. I know you're not interested in $THiNG now but can I follow up in 3 months?

In persona I think the AIs are that Claude is the engineer and Gemini is the sales-person and GPT is the eager and loud journeyman.

I don’t know, I’ve found the follow ups nice sometimes. You can just ignore them if they’re not useful. The computer won’t get mad…

Yes. Gemini is mimicking its creators: this is exactly how I experienced speaking to most Googlers.

Why not just write a skill and script that calls crawl4ai or similar and do this using Claude code?

You can store the page as markdown for future sessions, mash the data w other context, you name it.

The web Claude is incredibly limited both in capability and workflow integration. Doesn’t matter if you’re dealing with bids from arbor contractors or researching solutions for a DB problem.

That's so frustrating with Claude. If I need to widely search the web or if I need it to read a specific URL I pasted, I always turn to ChatGPT. Claude seems to hit a lot more roadblocks while trying to navigate the web.

It's not that hard to roll your own web search MCP.

I made one for Crush a while ago.

https://anduil.neocities.org/blog/?page=mcp

I'm not sure about the issues with reddit though? Do they block Claude's web fetch tool? I think Codex runs it thru some kind of cache proxy.

That’s a feature not a bug.

Here's my prompt to make ChatGPT sound more like Claude.

It works but not as well as I'd like -- the tone and word choice still ends up being really jarring to me (even after years of using ChatGPT). Maybe that's promptable too. Open to suggestions.

---

Respond in a natural conversational style. In terms of language, match my own tone and style.

Keep responses to half a page or so max. (Use context and your judgment. e.g. for example, initial response can be a page, and then specific follow up questions can be shorter, if the question is answered clearly)

Prefer minimal formatting. Don't use headings, lists etc. Bold and italics OK but keep it tasteful.

If you're starting a paragraph like so

Item name: description..

then it makes sense to bold item name for readability purposes.

Hah. I remember some story about a chatbot that had been trained on slack conversations. You would ask it for an essay on whatever, and it would say "will do" or "I'll have it for you tomorrow." :)

I find that Claude almost always ends its response with some sort of follow up question, despite my system prompt telling it not to.

I never really used ChatGPT much though so maybe Claude is just relatively less egregious?

This behavior first appeared in 4.5, mostly for specific types of questions and in "natural conversation" workflows. 4.6 might have pushed it further.

It’s probably an offshoot of making Claude more and more suitable for code/cowork.

> C#/.NET

same here :)

> one-shots a larger/complex C# feature

I can show you a timeseries data-renderer which was created with 1 initial very large prompt and then 3 following "change this and that" prompts. The file is around 5000 lines and everything works fine & exactly as specified.

I don't get it though. Why do you expect perfect responses? Humans continually make mistakes, and AI is trained on human data. Yet there seems to be this higher bar of expectation for the latter. Somehow people expect this thing that's been around for a few weeks/months, and cannot learn anything more beyond its training cutoff date, to always do a better job than a human who's been around for 20+ years and is able to learn on their own until death.

I see this over and over again. I don't dispute your experience. My experience with ESP32 development has been unreasonably positive. My codebase is sitting around 600k LoC and is the product of several hundred Opus 4.x Plan -> Agent -> Debug loops. I review everything that goes through, but I'm reviewing the business logic and domain gotchas, not dumb crap like what you and so many others describe.

What is so strange to me is that surely there is more C# out there than ESP-IDF code? I don't have a good explanation beyond saying that my codebase is extensively tested and used; I would know very quickly if it suddenly started shitting the bed in the way you explain.

Interesting - what kind of structural issues have you encountered?

Is these more related to the existing source code or is this a bad pattern thar you would never do regardless of the existing code?

[dead]

> One does often hear that where LLMs shine is with greenfield code generation but they all start to struggle working with pre-existing code. It could be that this wasn't a like for like comparison.

In my experience working in a large codebase with a good set of standards that's not the case, I can supply examples already existing in the codebase for Claude to use as a guidance and it generates quite decent code.

I think it's because there's already a lot of decent code for it to slurp and derive from, good quality tests at the functional level (so regressions are caught quickly).

I do understand though that on codebases with a hodge podge of styles, varying quality of tests, etc. it probably doesn't work as well as in my experience but I'm quite impressed about how I can do the thinking, add relevant sections of the code to the context (including protocols, APIs, etc.), describe what I need to be done, and get a plan back that most times is correct or very close to correct, which I can then iterate over to fix gaps/mistakes it made, and get it implemented.

Of course, there are still tasks it fails and I don't like doing multiple iterations to correct course, for those I do them manually with the odd usage here and there to refactor bits and pieces.

Overall I believe if your codebase was already healthy you can have LLMs work quite well with pre-existing code.

> One does often hear that where LLMs shine is with greenfield code generation but they all start to struggle working with pre-existing code.

Don't we all?

Greenfield implementation is not flawless as well.

Does it depend on what type of programming you do? Doing Swift/SwiftUI work, I have exactly the opposite experience. I’ve been using both recently, and I want to use Claude alone (especially after the last week’s events), but Codex is just so much faster and better.

...and of a lot of colleagues in and out of my sector :)

There are no universial morals. Anything - everything you think is evil some culture (possibly in history) thinks is good). I can't even think of something good that I'm confident everyone would agree is good.

there are some people (companies are run by people) that are so bad I boycott them. Most bad I treat like society cannot work without accepting them anyway.

The comment I replied to said that they believed OpenAI would allow "AGI to be used for truly evil purposes".

By contrast Anthropic wouldn't? Yet Anthropics stance is only two narrow restrictions. As I said are those two things the only evil things possible?

If not, why is it that people on HN think Anthropic would not allow evil usage?

My hypothesis is a halo effect. We are so enthralled by Claudes performance that some struggle to rationally assess what Anthropic has actually done.

Yes it's no small thing to say no to the Trump administration but that does not mean they haven't said Yes to otherwise facilitated other evils.

In fact to me the statements from Anthropic seem to make clear they are okay with many evils.

We'll take anything we can right now. I agree.

Although we shouldn't let that mean we misjudge what we are actually getting.

They are far from excellent and they were open sourced due to the mounting pressure for calling themselves "Open" AI and not doing anything open. At the time, they also had Chinese competitors wiping the market value of many stocks (NVidia, etc.) after releasing true OSS models that performed as good as SOTA models and they had to retaliate. I don't know of anyone who uses those OSS models in production instead of Qwen series or DeepSeek.

> Random guy on the internet posts links to cancel ChatGPT subscription

> Cancels subscription

> Random guy on the internet tells you to be outraged

> Gets outraged

I'm not even a fan of OpenAI generally speaking, but, this is just silly cancelling them for no reason. If not them, some other lab would have done it. Or worse, DoW would've forced them to.

> To believe that the AI companies aren't flooding all the social media zones with propaganda is disingenuous.

Touché

> To believe that the AI companies aren't flooding all the social media zones with propaganda is disingenuous.

You don't use "believe" with "disingenuous": it literally makes zero sense.

If people honestly believe that, they may be naive. Or they can be "disingenuous" if they're not being sincere. But if you just say what you believe, you're sincere (and maybe naive), and hence cannot possibly be disingenuous.