The OP seems unaware that Claude had a lead in this space and captured market share and attention for that reason alone.

The test they (supposedly) ran with their coworkers to look at PRs from both is such a bad way to compare LLMs that I don’t think they’re very experienced with using them.

Claude had a lead for a few weeks. When Codex launched it was better and it has been (marginally, yes, but still) better since.

It's marketing

Having a lead in a new market even for a short time creates initial conditions that are in your favor. That’s why startups get all fired up over being first to market.

Sure, but OpenAI has caught up with such velocity (and frankly has the better models) such that it's kind of irrational to refuse it based on "vibes"

I know it is irrational vibes, but how the whole Department of Defense situation was handled will always make me partial to Anthropic. Unless there so huge shift, of course.

No, it wasn't and no one who used Codex and Claude since release could seriously make this claim. It was a magnitude behind Claude and only catched up recently

> The OP seems unaware that Claude had a lead in this space

I remember using GitHub Copilot (OpenAI "Codex" mk1) in Aug 2021 (ChatGPT would launch a year later 2 weeks after Meta's botched Galactica release). Cursor & others took it and ran a mighty good race.

Okay so regardless of the model, platforms provide attestation from end to end that nothing is being logged from either input or output, including at the firmware and OS level to the extent that the customers have proof of the data never being saved. AFAIK, both GPUs and TPUs support this.

I have lots of choice (I own the company) but I'm still not going to switch from Claude until I see evidence that the alternative is meaningfully better. So far I don't see that evidence. In the past I've looked at using competitive products and it turned out to be a painful experience (Cursor didn't work at all on my computer, Google thing -- whatever it was at that time -- required dependencies I wasn't willing to install). I'm sure these issues have been resolved since but why would I spent time kicking the tires of another product just to have it work "as well"? Claude's cost to me is minimal so there's no cost savings to be made.

fwiw nobody "marketed to me". I picked Claude because friends were using it with great success and they helped me get started with suggestions on prompt style. Before that I'd played around with various LLMs for coding but not done any actual production work.

Corporate accounts pay the full api price, so I don't know what is stopping them or you from also using codex on the same terms?

Intellectual property. My employer has an agreement that our code will never end up as part of Claude's training data. At this point there are also now custom Claude integrations etc.

I'm sure they could also negotiate a similar deal with OpenAI but in my outsider experience it seems that negotiations around these kind of corporate contracts takes forever and when the selling point is "they're broadly pretty similar" I suspect the motivation isn't there.

> My employer has an agreement that our code will never end up as part of Claude's training data.

Bit of a tangent but it is funny to me that so many companies talk about how some large percentage (sometimes 100%) of their new code is LLM-written and they still bother to worry about their code being used for training.

If an LLM is writing all your new code then your existing code certainly wasn't some unique special secret, and your new code came from the LLM to begin with.

> My employer has an agreement that our code will never end up as part of Claude's training data.

“Our competitive advantage is that we believe them,” I’ve read—wonder if that’s still a [prevailing] sentiment.

(Edit - context was probably using SotA models instead of being limited to local open source only)

I think the marketing campaign came first. Anthropic captured developer mindshare first, then they brought it to their companies.

Claude Code was a huge huge huge step up when it came out, absolutely massive.

It was barely marketed. I always turned copilot off, never found any benefit from Cursor. Claude Code was vastly different in conception, function, and capability, a product that defined an entirely new category of product.

Perhaps to others, that found copilot or cursor useful, it was merely marketing. But to me it was function and productivity, that I had never seen before.

People try to dismiss these things as LLM wrappers, but the LLM will be commoditized, and the wrapper will be where the real product design goes and where the real differentiation happens. Owning that unique process of communication between the dev and what the dev wants, figuring out the most stuff with the least complete spec, and maximizing every bit of the very tiny communication channel between the dev and the LLM and the code on disk, that's where 2026 and 2027 will be focused, until the next category defining product is created.

Sorry, no. Claude Code was the product that brought coding agents to the mainstream. Sonnet 3.5 was the model and harness that created vibe coding.

This was a push of the technical frontier, not a marketing achievement.

I started using Claude web with sonnet over chatgpt before any of the coding tools came out and noticed other founders were using it too and the reason was pretty simple - it was much less likely to hallucinate non existing APIs than ChatGPT