Claude

When I'm working through something complicated like editing, thinking out loud, trying to structure an argument, Claude gives me a more complete answer without turning it into a back-and-forth endless optimization loop.

ChatGPT has this habit of ending every response with "want me to refine this further?" and you end up in an endless spiral. Claude just answers, and then the conversation tapers unless you push it which I tend to prefer.

People say that Claude's writing is more conversational, but I only found that to be the case after I gave it a huge system prompt based on my writing style with ChatGPT.

What I didn't expect is that Claude references skills automatically in every chat. With ChatGPT, you need to constantly add chats to a "project" in order to use a specific prompt, while every time I interact with Claude about anything writing related, it will reference that skill without me asking.

People mention this a lot and it's the reason I wanted to give it a try. When I give Claude a full brain dump, like a 20 minute voice dictation (shout out to Wispr Flow), it retains more of it and the output reflects that.

ChatGPT can start losing the thread when you give it a lot at once. Claude tends to stay slightly more cohesive throughout.

More than that, when you create a Skill within Claude, I haven't hit character limits, while with ChatGPT you are limited to 8,000 characters (sounds like a lot but I've already run into limitations).

Our lead engineer Bob programs more or less constantly evenings, weekends, side projects and if he had to pick one tool regardless of cost, he'd pick Claude Max 20x without hesitation.

His reasoning is that Claude genuinely understands your codebase better over time, especially once it's built up context on custom architecture.

When a bug is tied to something specific in how your app is wired, Claude tends to find the right reason more often than ChatGPT's Codex does.

That said, he said the "$100/mo plan is effectively unusable for serious work". You'll hit limits mid-task, which is more frustrating than anything. The $200/mo plan is totally worth it, from his POV.

He also prefers Claude's CLI over Codex's, and notes that it rolls out new features faster there's something almost game-like about it that makes it feel like the more alive of the two tools.

Unless you're living under a rock, you've seen countless videos and posts from people on social media talking about how they can now vibe code their own tools using Claude (with no coding experience).

While that's technically true, we are not buying that this is the future. Think about it, everyone has the tools to make videos, but are all videos good? No.

So if you've been feeling pressure to learn how to vibe code, I'll be the first to give you permission not to.

If you're interested in hearing more about this topic, we recorded an entire podcast called Claude Failed You that goes into 5 ways Claude influencer marketing is misleading users.

Cowork is Claude's desktop agent, it can take actions across your computer, integrate with tools, and work through tasks with more autonomy than a standard chat.

I can see this being super useful if you work heavily out of folders and project files. As for me, I mainly work out of apps like Superhuman Mail, Linear, Granola AI and use Viktor as my AI agent to execute work across them.

The biggest issue for me is that context doesn't persist across devices. I was working on something, switched laptops, and all of that context was just gone. Went to reference the work on my phone, and yep, it's no where to be found.

That said, it's been incredibly helpful for creating proposals, contracts, and presentations (I ditched using Gamma because Claude got so good). I create a folder, upload a bunch of screenshots, our brand guidelines and font, and it creates beautiful PDFs that are ready to send.

It guzzles usage and credits, but it's entirely worth it.

Claude Tag is Claude inside Slack. Instead of opening Claude in a separate app, your team can tag @Claude in a Slack thread and ask it to help. It can read the conversation, understand what people are talking about, and jump in with ideas, answers, or next steps.

It makes sense that Claude would build in this direction, as this is a way to integrate AI directly into where people work. That said, it's a bit of a chore to setup. You need to be on a team (5 seats) or enterprise Claude subscription.

For us, each team member started their own Claude subscription at different times and we never got around to being on an actual "team account", which meant even trying Claude Tag meant untangling admin logistics.

It's especially a chore because we have already been using Viktor (works in Slack and Microsoft Teams) and when comparing Viktor vs Claude Tag, we've found Viktor to be exceptional.

The main drawback of using Claude Tag (beyond the onboarding) is that you have one unique Claude Tag per channel, which means it does not have memory or context cross channels.

I get they built it that way for enterprises, but for us, this just means we end up having to re-explain context (which is what we're all burnt out from!).

It's amazing having a chat in a marketing or SEO channel, and Viktor being able to troubleshoot with our engineers with all of that context.

Claude has a browser sidebar so you can work with it while you're in your browser. In theory, great. In practice, it defaults to agent mode, meaning it wants to plan and take actions rather than just chat and summarize.

You can switch it to a simpler chat mode using the mode selector at the top of the sidebar, which helps. But the deeper issue is that if you close the sidebar, even by accident, even just to look at your screen, the entire conversation is gone. And when I say gone, I mean there is no recovering it. They are not stored in your chat history.

I know this because I lost a few conversations, and now I have a low-grade anxiety every time I use it. So much that that I stopped, and just went back to using ChatGPT Atlas and don't use the Claude extension.

Claude has an impressive list of connectors to other tools. We have Ahrefs, Figma, Linear, among others, connect in.