OpenAI won a lot of good favor for the generous Codex subscription and the efficiency of their models, but now that many people have switched over from Claude, they think they can leverage their position to peddle a stream of unnecessary products, and crack down on the generous limits[1] that brought everyone to Codex in the first place.
Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.
AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.
Did Claude actually lose the lead? They definitely lost a lot of good will but the only people I hear talking about actually switching away are people on message boards. Hermes/Openclaw users did as well but it was always reluctantly to something worse. At work it's still very much Claude first and only sometimes others if Claude fails, which is increasingly less often
I think it's pretty subjective if you mean "lead" to be capability and not raw number of users. I jumped back and forth quite a bit last year because there were some pretty major shortcoming in both. Now they're both quite reliable without too much hand-holding. Codex now consistently works better for the kind of work I'm doing, and it's good enough that I'm not inclined to go to claude, because I don't have any significant problems.
johnfahey · · focus · HN ↗
Anthropic did the same thing. Earlier this year, Claude subs and Claude Code took off because of the subscription's incredible capability and value, then once they gained enough users, they started focusing on unnecessary products no one asked for (see Claude in Slack), and eventually lost their lead. After losing a bunch of customers to Codex subs they realized their mistake, and now they're shipping again.
AI companies are bad at making software; they are good at making AI models. And that's about it.
[1] <a href="https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713" rel="nofollow">https://x.com/thsottiaux/status/2104823812042940713
Larrikin · · focus · HN ↗
ibejoeb · · focus · HN ↗