Hylak: Claude.com yields better coding results than Cursor, which loops frequently
Ben Hillock · OpenAI o1 isn’t a chat model (and that’s the point) · Jan 17, 2025 · at 26:06
Ben Hillock discusses his day-to-day coding setup and compares using Anthropic's Claude web interface against the AI-first IDE Cursor.
0:00 / 0:16exact quote · 16.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“I actually generally get better results out of Claude. It's in, you know, just Claude.com versus Cursor a lot of times which is interesting, like, I love being able to apply code, et cetera, But as far as just like, a lot of times I find it getting stuck in sort of a loop that I don't see in quad.com”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Ben Hillock
Hylak: Do not micromanage OpenAI o1's step-by-step reasoning when prompting
“What I found that worked really well was not telling the model how to think about it. If that makes any sense, like almost more like you're actually interfacing with a person, which is like scary in its own right. But no, if you're working with a like a cowork…”
Hylak: Users willing to wait five minutes for AI will wait an hour
“I think that it's like the number of tasks that you're willing to wait, you know, like 3:05 minutes for it. It's like probably pretty similar to the number of tasks you're willing to wait like an hour for, which is interesting.”
Hylak: OpenAI o1 struggles to match personal tone and writing styles
“I think that I've had a very hard time getting it to actually write stuff. I know that I've heard of people using it for writing where it's like processing diffs, more like providing critiques or feedback, but at least for myself, I haven't found a good way to…”
Hylak: Hidden reasoning tokens create an information asymmetry between OpenAI and developers
“I think that what makes a one even trickier than other models is that there is actually an asymmetric miss to how well open AI understands the model and how well we, for example, the fact that like reasoning tokens are hidden, right? So there's all this stuff …”