Why I chose Claude AI

1289 words, 7 minutes.

I’ll admit that most of my LLM use is for coding help. I’ve replaced the daily search engine with Kagi, so tend not to use a chat LLM for general search. I was a software engineer many years ago and wrote code as a day job, but I mostly gave up being hands-on about 10 years ago. I do, however, still enjoy solving problems. More often than not, a bit of code in a shell is far more efficient than trying to do anything on the web these days. Recently I swapped from using ChatGPT to Claude, for reasons that are mostly cultural versus technical.

Coding

Since ChatGPT came to prevalence in late 2022, I’ve written Go, Perl, Rust, various bits of shell (including awk, sed, et al), CSS, a smidgeon of Javascript and a lot of Python/Pandas in Jupyter. All with the help of what feels like an experienced (and patient) colleague sat at my side.

It probably helps that I used to be technical, so can steer an LLM to generate succinct code. I will often instruct it to try to stick to built in libraries, for example, to minimise code footprints. If an external module is required, and there are choices, I will grill the chatbot on which one is the smallest. Small is beautiful¹; simplify and add lightness², and all that.

Along with using ChatGPT, I’ve experimented with some local LLMs running under Ollama (interesting aside: I found a 2017 PC with an i7 chip and an Nvidia 3080, is twice as fast for local LLMs as an M1 Max MacBook Pro) and had occasionally tried Anthropic’s Claude.

I tend to run everything inside of TypingMind’s excellent UI (although also occasionally use Charm’s mods on a FreeBSD server) — which is great for switching between multiple models. Also, both OpenAI and Anthropic’s APIs are far cheaper than a monthly app subscription.

Things to make you go hmmm?

Recently, three things coincidentally happened that have made me gravitate towards Claude as my general purpose LLM of choice.

1. Coding with Claude has produced better results
2. An interview on Lenny’s Podcast with Seth Godin
3. An interview with Amanda Askell by Lex Fridman

They happened in that order, over the space of about five days. Let me break down how they came to influence my thoughts on Claude.

Tech choices

I’d been trying to ‘port’ a complex Excel spreadsheet to Jupyter for a few months. ChatGPT had failed multiple times to get it working, and my own coding skills were, as per usual, letting me down. I gave it to Claude Sonnet, and over the space of 3 or 4 hours, completely cracked it. What I found especially useful, besides it actually working, was Claude’s helpful suggestions along the way. It wanted to indulge further thought and explanation (yes, the cynic in you might well say ‘obviously, because that generates more revenue with API use’, but let’s gloss over the cynicism for now. I’m a pragmatic optimist) and would often proffer valuable next avenues to explore. Even the free Claude app has delivered a few quick code solutions for me.

Seth Godin

Then I was listening to Lenny Rachitsky interview marketing legend, Seth Godin. Seth talks about Claude in this portion (link should take you to around 18 minutes in), which really resonated with me, as I’ve long held the thought that a company’s culture is reflected in its products (bad culture = bad product. Tangentially, I had it in mind to write a blog about that some years ago, but then discovered a succinct piece in Don Norman’s excellent book, The Design of Everyday Things). Lenny also mentioned the cheeky ads Anthropic are running.

Amanda Askell

Despite what Reddit may say, the decisive point for me came in the second interview I listened to this week. I don’t usually listen to Lex’s interviews, and when the YouTube algorithm put the interview with Dario Amodei on my feed, it caught my interest. Straight away though, I was turned off by its 5 hour run time. Ridiculous! I don’t have time for that. But, as I often like to check my initial gut response, I took a look at the timestamps in the description, and saw that it was actually three interviews. I’d not heard of the other two Anthropic staffers interviewed, but the intro piece for Amanda Askell piqued my curiosity further:

You are a philosopher by training…

I ended up listening to the full interview with her, as she is largely accepted as the personality behind Claude. Once you hear her speak and listen to her thoughts, Seth’s comment starts to make sense in the context of your product is a result of your culture. Even if I hadn’t heard Seth, or even discovered Claude Sonnet’s ability to code better³, the interview with Askell probably would’ve created a sense of ‘brand loyalty’ in me.

I’ve mentioned anthropomorphising AI in a previous post, and here, at around 3h11m, Amanda talks about over anthropomorphising, and interestingly, under anthropomorphising, when conversing with an LLM chatbot.

Kagi

There’s no doubt that general purpose search engines are more or less useless for finding information now. I’ve been paying for Kagi for most of this year, and use it as my daily driver search engine⁴. Kagi uses machine learning, and its search results are superior to anything Google, DuckDuckGo et al provide (Kagi’s motivation isn’t to sell adverts, unlike other search engines). I often cross reference things gleaned in Claude with Kagi. I find that gives me a good way to keep the LLM in check (I have noticed Claude occasionally start out by saying it’s just an LLM and can ‘hallucinate’, so to check its answers. If only more humans had the will to self reflect).

A negative

I’ll finish with a slight grumble — in that I found having to use a mobile number to sign up for Anthropic overly intrusive. Really, there’s no need to have my email and mobile just to use the service. I’m starting to give up on lots of services that gather too much personal information, as most companies are sadly proving they can’t be trusted with user data. If Anthropic hadn’t asked for a phone number to register for Claude, my wife would’ve moved from ChatGPT. As it is, they lost a potential user. I wonder how many more people get turned off by that?

There is a lot of negative press about LLMs, but the genie is out of the bottle now. The naysayers may suggest AI will go no further and die, but I don’t believe that’s going to happen. There is genuine utility in AI use and in the right contexts, it can be a massive lever for metaphorical human lifting.

An update — May 2025

Ben Evans linked to a Bloomberg interview with Dario Amodei in his newsletter this week. It’s a good read, and in true confirmation bias fashion, it reinforces my hunch that Anthropic are trying to do the right thing. John Gruber also linked to interesting information about the Claude 4 testing.

I’ve been a paying Claude Pro user, as well as the API, for about three months now. I love the alt-space shortcut on macOS to type something to the app. Siri is dead to me LOL