GPT-5 is pretty decent nowadays, but Claude 4 Sonnet is superior in most cases. GPT beats it in cost and usable context window when something quite complex comes up to plan top-down.
What I find interesting is how much opinions vary on this. Open a different thread and people will seem to have consensus on GPT or Gemini being superior.
Well, last I checked Claude's webchat UI doesn't have LaTeX rendering for output messages which is extremely annoying.
On the other hand, I wish ChatGPT had GitHub integration in Projects, not just in Codex.
I've also had Claude Sonnet 4.0 Thinking spew forth incorrect answers many times for complex problems involving some math (with incapability to write a former proof sometimes), whereas ChatGPT 5 Thinking gives me correct answers with formal proof.
I think it depends on the domain. For example, GPT-5 is better for frontend, React code, but struggles with niche things like Nix. Claude's UI designs are not as pretty as GPT-5's.
This is also pretty subjective. I’m a power user of both and tend to prefer Claude’s UI about 70-80% of the time.
I often would use Claude to do a “make it pretty” pass after implementation with GPT-5. I find Claude’s spatial and visual understanding when dealing with frontend to be better.
I am sure others will have the exact opposite experience.
My experience is exactly opposite. Claude excelling in ui, and react. While gpt5 being better on really niche stuff, migth just be me better at caching when gpt5 halucinates as opposed to the claude4 hallucinations.
But after openai started gatekeeping all their new decent models in the api, i will happily refuse to buy more credits, and rather use foss models from other providers (I wish claude had proper no log policies).
I never implied it's useless. I don't have scientific data to back this up either, this is just my personal "feeling" from a couple hundred hours I've spent working with these models this year: GPT-5 seems a bit better at top-down architectural work, while Sonnet is better at the detail coding level. In terms of usable context window, again from personal experience so far, to me GPT-5 has somewhat of an edge.
Agreed. My experience is GPT5 is significantly better at large-scale planning & architecture (at least for the kind of stuff I care about which is strongly typed functional systems), and then Sonnet is much better at executing the plan. GPT5 is also better at code reviews and finding subtle mistakes if you prompt it well enough, but not totally reliable. Claude Code fills its context window and re-compacts often enough that I have to plan around it, so I'm surprised it's larger than GPT's.
