I don't think vibe coders know the difference, but often when I ask AI to add a feature to a large code base, I already know how I'd do it myself, and the answer that Claude comes up with is more often the one I would have done. Codex and Gemini have burned me too many times, and I keep going back to Claude. I trust it's judgement. Anthropic models have always been a step above OpenAI and Google, even 2 years ago it was like that so it must be something fundamental.
For me, Codex does well at pure-coding based tasks, but the moment it involves product judgement, design, or writing – which a lot of my tasks do – I need to pull in Claude. It is like Claude is trained on product management and design, not just coding.
I'm there with you, but only been using it a couple months now. I find that as long as I spend a fair amount of time with Claude specifying the work before starting the work, it tends to go really well. I have a general approach on how I want to run/build the software in development and it goes pretty smoothly with Claude. I do have to review what it does and sanity check things... I've tended to find bugs where I expect to see bugs, just from experience.
I keep using the analogy of working with a disconnected overseas dev team over email... since I've had to do this before. The difference is turn around in minutes instead of the next day.
On a current project, I just have it keep expanding on the TODO.md as working through the details... I'd say it's going well so far... Deno driver for MS-SQL using a Rust+FFI library. Still have some sanity checks around pooling, and need to test a couple windows only features (SSPI/Windows Auth and FILESTREAM) in a Windows environment, and I'll be ready to publish... About 3-4 hours of initial planning, 3 hours of initial iteration, then another 1:1:1:1 hours of planning/iteration working through features, etc.
Aside, I have noticed a few times a day, particularly west coast afternoon and early evening, the entire system seems to go 1/3 the speed... I'm guessing it's the biggest load on Anthropic's network as a whole.
