IDK if I'd call it "better."

HN did a massive 180 in the last month or two, and nearly every post or comment related to Anthropic is just a hate post.

The amount of anger against Anthropic on HN doesn't reflect anything I see in reality (and I work at a pretty big FAANG with Codex and Claude Code, both are great) so I do suspect that OAI is doing some guerrilla marketing here, while Anthropic isn't really marketing or doing PR at all.

  > I do suspect that OAI is doing some guerrilla marketing here, while Anthropic isn't really marketing or doing PR at all.

Sure, there's probably some accounts that are more or less controlled by the big AI labs here.

But looking at how humans have been acting for the last 20 years, you'll see that you don't need to pay people to promote things. They'll do it freely, because they identify with it and they can't fathom other people not agreeing with them.

Do you really thing that the weekly posts about people dropping AWS for Hetzner are paid by the German company?

No.

People have limited time and money. Some picked Claude, others picked Codex. Claude seems to be the most popular in terms of content produced about it. So some people probably picked Codex just because they don't want to be like everyone else. Then they obviously have to talk down about Claude, because if Codex is not better, then they are not. Simple.

And from my POV that's not a good thing because HN was the place where people didn't act like this. It was pragmatism and honest debate.

Now it's becoming: my agent is better than X, my stack is better than Y...

Personally i've just been using Claude Code with a coding agent UI (vibe-kanban) that has wrapped over "claude -p" for more than half a year without problems. I'd only been coding interactively and well within the terms of their subscription plan. I'm not even that much of a heavy user, I'm only hitting 10-40% of my weekly quota on a given week, and I basically only use the subscription outside of what Anthropic considers peak hours.

And then I got caught in the collateral damage a few days ago when Anthropic announced changes to their subscription plan billing, just like every other user of that tool and similar tools like Conductor and Zed. So in a month I won't be able to use my Claude sub quotas for these tools, all because some other people are ruining it for everyone by using "claude -p" to run openclaw, hermes agent and autonomous dark factories that burn billions of tokens a day.

I would have been fine with the change, except Anthropic's messaging was very slimy. They tried to spin their change as a positive change even though it was clearly not for anyone who was using a "claude -p" wrapper over Claude Code for better UX. They're within their rights to change their subscription billing, but they still couldn't be honest to their own users about it. Evidently, this kind of gaslighting and PR stunts is something they've done over and over in the last few months. It just didn't impact me until this time.

I care about AI safety and it would take a lot for me to switch from Anthropic to OAI, but I just wish they were less arrogant and cared about their users more. Right now their behavior is at best selfish (or overly consequentialist, and I don't mean that in a good way), and at worst actively hurting their AI safety efforts by pushing people to open-weight model alternatives which are way more dangerous than closed models due to people being able to remove their safeguards easily.

Honestly I expect it's just annoyed devs getting annoyed about the ratelimits on plans and post-hoc justifying. Now that Codex has far more capacity and their slot machine makes better outcomes (note: I am a heavy LLM-assisted coder) they feel like they have to justify their felt animosity towards these companies