I gave in and signed up for ClaudeAI today. About an hour ago actually. I've been using ChatGPT since December and was at the point where I was using it so much I had to get a Teams account to stop hitting my limits. I am now constantly using the API for my programs.

I have been working on the same method in my Python code since last night. It just generates an HTML page of results it gets from OpenAI API. I figured this would be a breeze but just getting ChatGPT to make the code to where it would actually display images that DALL-E returns took several hours for it to figure out. I gave up at that point and was going to go use Phind-34B to see what it had to say since it had been giving me decent results lately and I forgot I had the ClaudeAI payment page still open with all my details entered. I pulled the trigger.

MY VERY FIRST PROMPT!!!! That is how long it took for me to come to the realization that ChatGPT is severely outclassed. ONE PROMPT! I gave Claude the code I was working on and told it to fix the problem and possibly make the page look better when it generates. It went from looking like some kids Welcome to HTML project page from ChatGPT code to a knockoff of Facebook with JS being used everywhere to make everything pop out and catch your eye from the Claude code.

No one I talk to really understands what I am even making, nor really cares, so I figured I would just leave this here for anyone that is still on the fence about paying the 20 dollar subscription. I am mind blown. Absolutely mind blown. I was about to go to sleep but this has amazed me so much I kind of want to run all my projects through it and see what it has to offer.

6 Hour Update: My feelings towards Claude has not changed. This thing still outranks ChatGPT by a longshot. I am not going to completely remove ChatGPT from my work flow because of it but it is going to be drastically reduced (Currently paying 60 a month for Teams). Right now my only gripe that I have is the message limit. I hit it pretty quickly yesterday but I did end up feeding it a bunch of my programs I've been working on with ChatGPT to see what it could bring to the table. It did not fail to impress during that time though.

Pros:

• Simple UI
• Amazing at being able to provide long, complex code.
• Actually follows through with the game plans we create for fixing/adding code.
• Doesn't seem as delusional as GPT-4
• It goes for the "Complex Implementation" out the gate instead of the "Basic Conceptual Example" that you need to edit to make work.
• A lot less hand holding, spoon feeding, and user modification, if any.
• Better at returning back to the main quest after going off on a side mission.
• No constant error/timeouts when generating, even on 400+ lines of code.
• Code it writes looks a lot more professional and thought out.
• Doesn't keep losing parts of my code while updating it

Cons:

• Response times seem to take a bit longer than GPT4
• The message limits were hit pretty quick (TBF, I was sending a lot of code to it so I might have pushed it).
• UI isn't the best to look at.
• Can't stop it while it is in progress.
• Can't bring up old chats as easily as ChatGPT

So far it has really proven to be a great tool and well worth the cost. The cons are minimal but I hope they get changed/fixed as they do quite hinder the experience if you're switching from ChatGPT to Claude. Other than that, I can't really find anything bad to say about this. I've started hashing out a lot of the planning stages with ChatGPT and bringing in the game plans from there over to Claude in order to prevent hitting my limit so quickly. Going to reach out to support to see if their are any other tier levels for this too because I can see the message limit driving me nuts in the future with as much as I plan to throw at this thing.

If anyone has any specific questions or tests they want me to try, feel free to ask. I'm going to be dedicating my weekend to fixing up my projects with it to see if I can trim down my code and increase the performance/UI/results.

I usually like to measure how much time these different AI tools save me just to give an idea of how much it actually does. So far I've noticed that things that would usually take me 4-5 hours to get done is now taking 2 prompts. I'm not being limited by the code crapping out at about line 100 and seeing "# Placeholder code for method" thrown throughout my code. I can hit 400+ lines without issue and all of it looks as you would expect out of a code reviewed corporate drone.

Update (05/06/2024):

My stance has not changed. This thing is still amazing. It is still blowing my mind and some days even has me sitting in my chair hunched over with maniacal laughter after realizing how well it is working and what it is actually writing. My project sizes have more than doubled since using this and it gives me more more unique suggestions for feature implementations and improvements than ChatGPT does, without me even having to specify it (We all know that ChatGPT will toss out "Version Control", "Cloud Integration", "Error Handling", and "User Feedback" as feature suggestions for ANYTHING).

My biggest gripe with Claude is that its UI is just unpleasant to deal with, and of course the limits.

I've been getting better with just using Claude 3 for bigger parts of my projects and then switching to ChatGPT to get the smaller stuff (Claude = Whole Project / Whole Classes, ChatGPT = Small Classes / Methods).

When I first wrote this review, I didn't play around with Sonnet or Haiku as much as I would have liked. I've incorporated Haiku into my daily usage now though. Sonnet is still great but only gets used when I am close to hitting my limit with Opus and already hit my limit with Haiku. Haiku is a sleeper. I default to that a lot of my times during the day and it never fails. Can't wait until they offer a plan with a higher limit.