Working with AI

I build real software with these things daily, which is a different activity from having opinions about them. What follows is what I have actually found, including the parts that are less flattering than the marketing.

Claude

The golden retriever of AI's. Claude and Claude Code are what I reach for when the task is large and structural: refactors that span a dozen files, designing a module before writing it, or working through why something fails only in a sandbox. It holds a long context without losing the thread, and it will argue with a bad premise instead of cheerfully implementing it. Opus 5 was a huge step back, but with Fable 5 they are recovering. I have projects with hundreds of hours working with Claude Code.

Used agentically it will happily run the tests, read the failure and fix the cause. The failure mode to watch is confident momentum — it is much better at doing what you asked than at stopping to ask whether you should. Fable 5 is improving this and is much better at getting things right the first time.

Microsoft Copilot M365

Copilot is like a cat — it has a mind of its own and does not always want to do what you ask. For coding especially it is lazy and won't do everything you asked for. I've stopped using it for coding and now use it for Teams meetings — transcripts and summaries, and to search my mail, Teams messages, OneDrive and SharePoint shares for content I need. I would use the agent feature more, but the licensed agents do not work for people without one, so I stopped using the feature.

Microsoft needs to step up. They are getting left behind. Even though they are getting newer models, the models work much worse in Copilot, and you feel like you are struggling with a 2+ year-old AI model.

ChatGPT

I've been using ChatGPT since day one and still use it regularly. Now that the Astra model has released, it's actually a competitor to Claude Code. It took a while to get there — I've seen more hallucinations than a psychiatrist on a psych ward. Starting my first big project with Codex, and I'm excited to see the results.

What actually changed

• The blank page stopped being expensive. A first draft of anything is now minutes.
• Reading unfamiliar code got dramatically faster — explain-this-to-me at scale.
• Tests get written, because the tedium argument for skipping them has evaporated.
• Prototypes that were never worth the weekend now get built on a Tuesday.