8/18/2026 at 6:08:31 PM
I think the difference between the Anthropic token maximization approach (vibe code all the things!) and OpenAI's focus on efficiency, terseness and token reduction are going to be the defining features of who wins the long-term race.My money is on the more efficient solution. Even if Anthropic can win some benchmarks by using 3x tokens over 3x time, it is a terrible base to build toward the future. Users are no longer willing to wait exponentially long for linear improvements. And as we see from some of the Chinese models, they can quickly distill frontier models with the tax of being slower and more token-guzzling, while retaining most of the quality. The real differentiators are becoming speed and efficiency, which translate to cost and user velocity more than incremental capability improvements.
It's great that frontier models can solve complex math equations, but bread and butter LLM usage (where the money is made) has already shifted from "I need the best always" to "what solves my day-to-day problems quickly and consistently". Fable usage as a percentage is flat-lining. We are already at the point where output quality is negligible. What wins going forward is cost, speed, consistency and the compounding effects of "softer" improvements to the harness.
by lubujackson
8/18/2026 at 6:35:51 PM
Not to sound like a mark, I try to not get attached to any of these providers.I've jumped between copilot, claude, gemini and chatgpt since the start of the year. chatgpt wasn't even worth looking at early this year.
Anthropic has the smarter models for sure, and seems to be default in corporate. However, the amount of budget you get with GPT as a user is much better, the harness feels more polished, and the models are faster. They are also much nicer to work with, I can just read the output for the most part. With claude I get pages of text and need to skim to find where the actual information i need to care about lies. So much more cognitive overhead.
Sol is smart enough for anything I've thrown at it, it's not one-shotting like fable, but I'm more willing to actually go back and forth with it, and it's likely producing better output to keep a human in the loop rather than trying to solve the world independently and making multiple incorrect assumptions.
I think GPT sees the market changing and is correctly repositioning themselves. Anthropic is down the wrong road, and if they don't correct course quickly I'm sure many of those enterprise contracts will start pivoting.
by WhiteDawn
8/18/2026 at 7:27:00 PM
> and it's likely producing better output to keep a human in the loop rather than trying to solve the world independently and making multiple incorrect assumptions.I was just discussing this with a co-worker yesterday. I would really like a model (or harness?) that worked with me instead of for me. Walk me through its choices and decisions, let me correct it and guide it along. I would be way more confident in it's output, I would be more familiar with the changes that are being made, and it would make reviewing the final code way easier since I was making the decisions along side it. I'm sure it would also reduce the "brainrot" we're all going to experience the more we hand work to these models.
by stanmancan
8/19/2026 at 8:40:51 AM
Aside from the skills mentioned, I recently found that asking the model to create a simple HTML presentation to walk you through it's proposed design can do wonders. Fine tune your prompt to your liking (language style, what to include, what not, etc). Then, read that thing thoroughly, and keep asking questions and iterating on the plan until you fully understand what's about to be built, and are happy with it.by danielbarla
8/18/2026 at 7:49:45 PM
Those exist and they're called orchestration skill frameworks like Superpowers, GetShitDone, etc.by halfmatthalfcat
8/18/2026 at 8:39:46 PM
does "Superpowers" exist outside of the Claude ecosystem? I feel like I've become hooked on this workflow - honestly I could take or leave the models ... it's the workflows and the way that they essentially create tightly focused loops over multiple sessions that I've becoming fairly dependent on.by ray_v
8/18/2026 at 8:48:10 PM
Yes, Superpowers is just a set of (agent agnostic) skills that you can use in any harness.by halfmatthalfcat
8/19/2026 at 1:56:39 AM
the "grill" skill from matt pocock is quite nice for thisby forsakenharmony
8/18/2026 at 7:11:45 PM
> I think GPT sees the market changing and is correctly repositioning themselvesI'm not sure how they'll survive their creditors tbh
by esseph
8/19/2026 at 12:42:17 PM
I'm ok with that. When the.major AI players implode under debt, it will create a massive proliferation of folks who go on to start new businesses unencumbered by the debt and bad decisions by the current leaders.The collapse of the massive overvaluation and circular investments will be the undoing of several major tech investors and companies that have a serious contribution to the things in tech we don't like. It will be bad for the economy, but it will also weaken the abhorrent control that those companies have over regulation in the United States.
It's gonna be a rough time, but it's pretty clearly necessary.
The only big problem is that if that collapse happens under the current administration in the US, they will be utterly incompetent to respond to a real domestic crisis, since they have been virtually unable to do anything without creating more problems.
by ygjb
8/18/2026 at 6:41:25 PM
I just need a Sol translator to sit in front of Fable and Opus :/by throwaway894345
8/18/2026 at 6:58:52 PM
The Opus-human patois is unbearableby astro1234
8/18/2026 at 8:21:30 PM
Opus yesterday produced this gem: "Standing where it stood." I replied, "never stop stopping!" and we had a stalemate, lolby vardalab
8/18/2026 at 6:18:33 PM
I really would like to see OpenAI’s focus on efficiency but everytime I use Codex, it wastes tokens like there’s no tomorrow, hitting week limit in a day, where I’m able to use Claude just fine. Maybe it’s based on the codebase, I don’t know, but I have better results with Claude than Codex.by rebolek
8/18/2026 at 6:27:58 PM
It might be your prompting.My boss uses opus and gets good results when I use it always burns tokens. The other way is also true too I get great results with sol/terra but my boss does not.
by vorticalbox
8/19/2026 at 12:46:44 PM
One of my challenges is that I often end up burning tokens trying to build the right solution rather than building a solution that is good enough and deferring the right choices until later. I have been actively working to change my expectations for building with AI to accept worse solutions to get things going rather than trying to solve everything at launch.This has been a recurring problem for me - as a security engineer catasrophization is a fundamental skill to finding vulnerabilities in complex systems, but makes me to conservative when building. For some of my leaders they are much better at saying 'good enough, ship it, and fix it later'.
by ygjb
8/18/2026 at 8:13:48 PM
Maybe. But if Claude is fine with my prompts while Codex uses them as an excuse to burn tokens. I have nothing against the model, they are more or less on pair, it’s just that Claude is giving me more value for same money.by rebolek
8/18/2026 at 8:58:49 PM
If Claude is working for you then stick with it! Happy you’re getting good value from Claude.by vorticalbox
8/18/2026 at 6:34:50 PM
At least with OpenAI you can use a third party harness like Pi.by llama052
8/19/2026 at 4:12:34 AM
Codex is fabulous at work, where token use is near limitless and ultra-thorough tool use is welcome. Go ahead and fire off searches for look-alike terms on my 96-core cloud instance.By contrast, Claude Code's bias to make assumptions of reasonableness about underlying systems has proven to be immensely frustrating over the last month or two, both personally and at work. I've wasted days on "that was my mistake. I've been reporting numbers on the old architecture because I hadn't enabled the new one in the config" both at work and home. It's immensely frustrating.
But here we are. Wrestling with energetic idiots in model form, wrangled by over-specific harnesses that struggle to stay off of deranged side-quests.
What a time to be alive!
by chaboud
8/18/2026 at 6:26:44 PM
I had the opposite experience. Claude models and its harness feel like they are set to eat tokens for everything, especially if it’s ultracode effort. I have seen it spawn 6 agents and eat my 4-hour quota right in front of me. Codex is on point and follows instructions well even with max effort. I like my analogy of Claude being garrulous and Codex being laconic. If I see more limit hits in same sitting session, I have to rearrange my workflows. my experiments with qwen and deepseek have been good, cant wait to try glm and other models.by bicepjai
8/18/2026 at 6:32:50 PM
Just before I canceled my 20x Max sub I had a day where I had ~15% of my weekly I was trying to burn. I set it on ultracode and because I had set the max agents 32 for another project and forgot, the five research agents ended up spinning up a total of 26 subagents and burned through the remainder of my weekly in the span of 20 minutes before I noticed and shut it down.“No, not like THAT!”
by throwup238
8/18/2026 at 7:44:10 PM
Claude did the same thing to me the other day. I ran out of my 5 hr limit, and it went into my $100 credit they had given me. Multiple parallel agents. It ate it in no time flat.When I checked, all that credit was gone, I still wasn't into the next 5 hours, and all the agents had failed, returning nothing.
I didn't even get anything for burning all that credit. If I had paid for it, I'd be very, very pissed.
by wccrawford
8/18/2026 at 10:35:17 PM
Similar experience here. I had raised my cap to $20 because they had given me promo credit. The credit expired without me using it and I didn’t notice.One fine day I was like, oh my weekly quota resets soon, I will kick off an expensive bug hunt. It launched parallel things and burned $10 in like a moment.
It’s scary. I turned off extra usage after that.
by newAccount2025
8/18/2026 at 6:42:21 PM
How can you burn through your weekly budget in 20 minutes? You'd hit your 5 hour budget way before that, right?by vanviegen
8/18/2026 at 7:34:28 PM
The five hour budget is about 15% of the weekly on Max 20x. I had about 15% left.by throwup238
8/19/2026 at 1:13:14 PM
Ah sorry, I read your earlier comment as you being at 15% of your weekly (so the prompt consuming 85%).by vanviegen
8/18/2026 at 7:09:02 PM
Here is an excerpt from the system prompt for UltraCode (Same for Fable,Opus,Sonnet):"Ultracode. When a system-reminder confirms ultracode is on, that opt-in is standing: author and run a workflow for every substantive task by default. The goal is the most exhaustive, correct answer you can produce — token cost is not a constraint."
by NyxWulf
8/18/2026 at 6:51:19 PM
Requesting ultracode is basically asking for maximum token usage. If you want to limit consumption, use medium or high.by StilesCrisis
8/19/2026 at 5:47:01 PM
[flagged]by killix
8/18/2026 at 6:24:41 PM
same boat.gpt 5.5/5.6 goes further on its own much more often than opus 4.8/5 does. codex capped ~300k context when claude does 1m.
I don't feel codex is saving tokens, and result is usually not as good imo.
by jimmydoe
8/18/2026 at 6:35:43 PM
> codex capped ~300k context when claude does 1m.That's configurable in codex.. but there is a higher cost/usage to using it.
by gatio
8/19/2026 at 1:49:54 AM
Are you kidding me? OpenAI weekly limits feel _infinite_. I run out of Anthropic limits reliably halfway through the weekby shepherdjerred
8/18/2026 at 6:23:29 PM
You've articulated what I found unsettling about Boris' pov that "coding is a solved problem". I listened to a few of his talks and was instinctively off-put by that sentiment. I figured a fellow programmer would understand and speak on the nuances.Granted it did make me think about my biases and to lean into more future facing inevitabilities. But you've nailed it, for Boris and Anthropic, they are betting that coding is a solved problem in the sense that any person can one-shot any random idea and the output will be in some abstract sense "good". And then at what cost and toward what end?
by apsurd
8/18/2026 at 6:34:06 PM
On the one hand it feels true. On the other I ask - what good software have anthropic, or anyone else, produced that was fully vibed?As someone who does near 100% of my coding via LLM these days, i still find that for anything complex i am still looking at and thinking in terms of code. Im still quality checking and steering at some interval via code. And im still not sure how or whether i can replicate that level of thought without still dealing in code at times.
by cloverich
8/18/2026 at 6:37:34 PM
It's a scale thing. with one fairly simple Android app, it's doable. anything Enterprisey is a nightmare. maybe that's the lesson and the problem is not with the llms but with accidental complexity. Just right now I feel like I'm one mythical LLM minute away from the next clean pull request...by polotics
8/19/2026 at 2:13:42 AM
You'll have to define "good" before you can expect quality responses.by joquarky
8/18/2026 at 6:36:24 PM
In this last week I've started reviewing code more and in just a short time, I've found 3 fairly simple things that were introduced by Claude that were not wrong per se, however, they were very inefficient and didn't address the root of the issue. I still think we're in a place where the output looks good as long as you don't look under the hood or keep it scoped to small, vibe-coded projects. Once you get beyond that it can fall apart. Anthropic must have a large codebase by now though. Yet I haven't seen much released from them about how they actually work day to day on development.by mattm
8/18/2026 at 6:39:22 PM
What makes you think Antropic has a large code base? what do they do exactly that would make them need a large code base? Or maybe the word Large can be understood in different way?by polotics
8/18/2026 at 6:19:29 PM
> who wins the long-term raceIsn’t the race between Chinese open-weight models and the others more decisive for the future?
by smartmic
8/18/2026 at 6:24:43 PM
it'll all be centralized models justifying their capability against local inference in, maybe 3 years or lessonce we have a bit more memory fab capacity and the insane bottomless investment in AI giants realizes there is a bottom, local hardware will catch up with model performance to the extent that centralized inference will be downgraded to special cases or for orgs that find it cheaper than buying expensive hardware
but really most power users are going to have 1 TB unified RAM and local models that will do well enough
for light office use you can still have a cheap laptop and a claude subscription
by colechristensen
8/18/2026 at 6:40:07 PM
I think the race is actually between locally optimized rigs with extremely strict context management, and the rest.by polotics
8/18/2026 at 6:44:06 PM
Those rigs are running one of the open Chinese models though, right?by nozzlegear
8/18/2026 at 6:40:17 PM
> My money is on the more efficient solution. Even if Anthropic can win some benchmarks by using 3x tokens over 3x time, it is a terrible base to build toward the future. Users are no longer willing to wait exponentially long for linear improvements.As much as I wish you were right, everything about software economics for the last 30+ years has favored _less efficient software_. Traditional hardware has been optimized for traditional software for decades and we still see bloated software win consistently. LLM hardware is at the start of its cycle, with abundant low-hanging fruit to conquer--I would expect the pro-bloat dynamics to weigh even more heavily in the LLM space than in the traditional software space.
by throwaway894345
8/19/2026 at 12:14:50 AM
LLMs are already of sufficient capability that if they were super cheap and fast and made no progress on intelligence, we will still make huge leaps in our ability to build systems and solve problems.I'm just happy there is capital behind the efficiency path because I am confident we can get positive value on that path.
by planckscnst
8/18/2026 at 6:13:56 PM
Oh no, I use the top shelf models every day and I really think they have a lot of room to improve in pretty much every regard. I suspect Fable usage is flatlining because it's not that good comparitively and way too expensive.by wilg
8/18/2026 at 6:38:30 PM
Seems like it wouldn't be hard for Anthropic to tweak a few prompts or RL pipelines to tune for terseness and token-efficiency if that stays as something that consumers want.I find it unlikely that there's some fundamental property of OpenAI's models' "personality" or style which Anthropic (or any other serious AI firm) wouldn't be able to match if they wanted to.
by Ameo
8/19/2026 at 12:18:22 AM
They are both on borrowed time. The only thing keeping them afloat business wise is that current hardware costs are prohibitive which keeps local models artificially constrained. The next era will be open weight / local model for the masses and SOTA for the big players.by JamesSwift
8/19/2026 at 10:42:20 AM
If your prognosis is true I'm not sure it's fully positive. Inference without batching is just massive less efficient, even if local hardware can be more energy efficient per operation and can skip out on cooling.Open weights, obviously beneficial. Local compute when not necessary, seems like it'd be significantly worse for the environment?
by Tarean
8/19/2026 at 3:07:46 PM
To more fully flesh out what my thoughts on this:I think because more devs cant run things locally, we are not getting the "open source gains" that you would get by having the network effect of more eyes on the work. Theres still little nuggets of gold in there though (eg antirez's DS4 project). But once more people can get their hands on hardware, I think the flood gates will open. And once that happens, I dont necessarily think people will run locally. But that will enable fungible service providers which we already see, but at a much larger scale.
To a lesser degree, open weights also leads to an eventuality of these two companies not being able to sustain their capital investments. Not to mention their pricing models are unsustainable as they currently stand. So they are being eroded from the outside-in, while also trying to fight the internal pressure to continue to raise prices/margins.
EDIT: I actually think the harness is more of a future for these big players. And theres real value in providing a high quality harness. So maybe they move to SAAS for claude code in the future. Who knows
by JamesSwift
8/18/2026 at 6:25:13 PM
Claude used to be 10x more efficient. I think there are no barriers of entry between one coding agent and the other. Therefore, I expect them to reverse as soon as people switch. At least this is what I will do.by ph4rsikal
8/18/2026 at 8:11:05 PM
If the problem isn't that hard, I've been using Cursor's Auto or Grok 4.5 (not 4.6, it's too slow).They're both pretty damn competent and more important, Extremely Fast! I find the speed more useful than trying to be a hundred percent complete on every task. The big intelligent models screw up all the time as well, but I have to wait twenty minutes to three hours to find out.
GPT 5.6 is especially tenacious and seems to want to solve every bug in edge case 1000% all the time. Sometimes that's what you need, but a lot of times you're just trying to move fast and figure out what the product is.
by thefourthchime
8/18/2026 at 6:27:02 PM
There is no evidence regarding distillation. It is impossible to distill a model in just a month which was the gap between fable and Kimi k3. Anthropic wouldn't even keep up with the load. It is just another example of American exceptionalism.by alightsoul
8/18/2026 at 6:35:40 PM
“In one notable technique, their prompts asked Claude to imagine and articulate the internal reasoning behind a completed response and write it out step by step—effectively generating chain-of-thought training data at scale. We also observed tasks in which Claude was used to generate censorship-safe alternatives to politically sensitive queries like questions about dissidents, party leaders, or authoritarianism, likely in order to train DeepSeek’s own models to steer conversations away from censored topics. By examining request metadata, we were able to trace these accounts to specific researchers at the lab.”
— “You are an expert data analyst combining statistical rigor with deep domain knowledge. Your goal is to deliver data-driven insights — not summaries or visualizations — grounded in real data and supported by complete and transparent reasoning.” (variations appearing 10s of 1000s of times)
https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...Does Dario have the same relationship with the truth as Sam? (Their companies pirate books and develop products that compete at some level with those books’ authors, so obviously neither are that wonderfully trustworthy, so maybe “no evidence” meant you don’t believe this evidence rather than you weren’t aware of it. I would understand and respect your lack of belief!)
by Barbing
8/18/2026 at 6:40:24 PM
That's what any harness could do. By itself it's not evidence of distillation. Just mentioning Deepseek in there is just fear mongering, again American exceptionalism, which creates the belief only the US has the right to own cutting edge technology. It's a disservice to the entire world, and china happens to be the only challenger to that belief. They surely also asked for tasks to avoid mentioning Trump's involvement in the Epstein files and CP, but don't mention those, due to American exceptionalism. Dario has stated that he is an American exceptionalist. He powers Israeli/US bombings in Gaza, but only cares when China does the same.This is evidence only if you're an American exceptionalist.
by alightsoul
8/19/2026 at 12:14:36 AM
One can, say, hate America and feel its lunch is about to be munched by China and still read: “These labs generated over 16 million exchanges with Claude through approximately 24,000 fraudulent accounts…”
and think “oh, there’s alleged evidence of distillation“.
by Barbing
8/19/2026 at 2:14:26 AM
The source is just anthropic saying what they believe and not providing any evidence beyond what they say. No raw chat logs to analyze independently. That's American exceptionalismby alightsoul
8/19/2026 at 4:44:23 AM
It’s not as trustworthy as it could be. Are you using the term as commonly known?https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_exceptionalism
Seymour Martin Lipset, a prominent American political scientist and sociologist, argues that the United States is exceptional in that it started from a revolutionary event. He therefore traces the origins of American exceptionalism to the American Revolution, from which the U.S. emerged as "the first new nation" with a distinct ideology, and having a unique mission to transform the world. This ideology, which Lipset calls "Americanism" but is often also referred to as "American exceptionalism", is based on liberty, individualism, republicanism, democracy, meritocracy, and laissez-faire economics; these principles are sometimes collectively referred to as "American exceptionalism".
As a term in political science, American exceptionalism refers to the United States' status as a global outlier both in good and bad ways. Critics of the concept say that the idea of American exceptionalism suggests that the U.S. is better than other countries, has a superior culture, or has a unique mission to transform the planet and its inhabitants.
Like, when I consider the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments or MK Ultra, or Flock, I have bad things to say about them but American exceptionalism specifically wouldn’t cross my mind. Corporations anywhere playing a card close to the chest or even lying… superiority, exceptionalism, aren’t my top reference points.
by Barbing
8/20/2026 at 3:54:00 AM
Since America is the first new nation, and individualism is a core value, the antithesis, communism, presents a direct threat. It's true that china can then be seen as a threat. My problem is with this bit: having a unique mission to transform the world. As we see with the pax silica agreement, even though it's not the stated mission of pax silica, the people behind it were born around that idea since a young age. No frontier US models is open source. Dario did not say in his open source letter, that his concerns about china also apply to the US, even though both countries are using ai in missiles today. I am just tired of this double standard where something is only bad if china or some other country does it like Singapore washing or the Panama papers even though it is standard corporate strategy worldwide to use legal domiciles in a country other than your own for fundraising or tax evasion. When Google does it, names are assigned like the Delaware loophole, but are spread far less than Singapore washing or the Panama papersby alightsoul
8/19/2026 at 7:07:49 PM
that seems like an american definition of american exceptionalism?everyone else uses it as "Americans love to criticize everyone else, while pretending their farts dont stink"
by 8note
8/20/2026 at 9:01:51 AM
Perhaps.Perhaps partially covered in the “Critics of the concept say…”
Certainly weird to think the US isn’t chock full of problems (even if historically some stuff has been neat, like bringing together cultures and developing nifty tech in Silicon Valley).
by Barbing
8/18/2026 at 6:39:38 PM
When they do that they pay billions . Unlike China. That’s the order of law vs bunch of companies in a totalitarian governmentby maxdo
8/18/2026 at 6:41:42 PM
They are not paying billions anymore. They just switched to buying and then destroying books. Arguably that's worse than training off of Anna's archive which Chinese companies still do. This comment is another example of American exceptionalism.by alightsoul
8/20/2026 at 9:55:16 PM
You know that buying a book vs buying a license is a very different purchase right ? And it does not work legally this way . Stop spreading made up storiesby maxdo
8/18/2026 at 7:30:21 PM
Can you really hold them responsible for book burning when they’re being compelled to do so by governmental laws? Seems like you should be pointing your finger at lawmakers, if anywhere.by jimbob45
8/20/2026 at 10:05:15 PM
You pay royalties to your publisher . They monitor situation , if a model has unfair amount of context about the book they bring you to court . Once they win they spread some money between owners + keep some money to fight future violations on the scale since it’s profitable for book publishers.It’s economically lucrative for everyone in that chain to attack again and again ai vendors , unless they are in China . In this case they can only cry .
by maxdo
8/18/2026 at 7:34:43 PM
Me? A lowly commoner without hundreds of millions to lobby them? Why aren't American ai companies doing so? Too busy training models? They're shooting themselves in the foot when they could just use Anna's archive and lobbying is cheaper than paying billions in copyright settlements. Oh wait I am wrong. Shredding and scanning books is much cheaper than lobbying to use Anna's archive. Still can't do anything because I don't have money for lobbyingby alightsoul
8/18/2026 at 11:34:27 PM
shouldn't you be pointing fingers at lawmakers and not to OP?by brazukadev
8/18/2026 at 7:09:54 PM
They paid $1.5 billions in July . Keep ignoring facts and believe in some nonsenseby maxdo
8/18/2026 at 7:32:44 PM
That was a one time payment. Another example of America exceptionalism assuming its a periodic payment like paying rent. look how they give money to publishers who then give back crumbs to the authors themselves.by alightsoul
8/20/2026 at 9:53:46 PM
Who told you it’s periodic ? To find a stolen book in llm is very easy . And if you break same rules twice any judge will fine you more for that . You break you pay .
That’s why in the western world you got book publishers . They have lawyers etc .If you prefer Chinese way : laugh at anyone who is taking about copyright , whether that a book , a model , or manufacturing secrets in eu , us or whatever sure .
A family business of my friend in eu was destroyed due to stealing until every single bolt position design of their system by China . They had no legal protection .
Keep calling rule of law vs no such rules an American exceptionalism .
by maxdo
8/18/2026 at 7:06:08 PM
[dead]by maxglute