I find Claude tends to be better at creative writing and to provide more thoughtful answers. Claude also tends to write more elegant code than GPT, but that code tends to be incorrect slightly more often as well. It tends to get confused by questions that aren't clearly worded that GPT handles in stride though.
I've found Claude useless for writing purposes (even rubber-duck brainstorming), because it eventually but inevitably makes everything more and more sesquipedalian, ignoring all instructions to the contrary, until every response is just a garbage mess of purple prose rephrasing the same thing over and over again.
I don't know what the deal is, but it's a failure state I've seen consistently enough that I suspect it has to be some kind of issue at the intersection of training material and the long context window.
I wanted to like Claude but for all my trying I could not get even Opus to understand brevity. I found myself repeating variations of "do not over-explain. just give brief answers until I ask for more" over and over until I cancelled my subscription in frustration.
I am sure there is a technical skill in getting Claude to shut the hell up and answer, but I shouldn't have to suss out its arcane secrets. There should be a checkbox.
Thank you for introducing me to "sesquipedalian", a word I've never seen before in over 20 years of venturing in the anglosphere, but one which I, as a native speaker of an Awful (and very sesquipedalian) Language, instantly fell in love with. :)
