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- Hacker News
- > It’s striking the extent to which Claude Code and Codex are proving to be quite sticky; whichever harness you start working with is likely to be the one you stick with, and that figures to be even more the case with non-technical users.
My experience has been quite the opposite. I was using Claude Code almost exclusively this winter/spring and swapped to Codex earlier this summer. It took no time whatsoever to switch. And before Claude Code, I was using Cursor. Same story.
[edit: Oh and there was also a brief interlude with Conductor, though I think they're more or less just serving the underlying Claude/Codex harness]
by wxw - As a Hacker News user and commenter, you are not the type of user he’s referring to.
- I use a mixture of claude code and codex and kiro as my swarm.
They communicate through my own harness, and it's working pretty well so far. claude code is being overtaken by codex however because I noticed lately the accuracy of the latter is the best.
by Aperocky - My same progression here. I started with ChatGPT website, then Anthropic website, then Cursor, then Windsurf!, then claude, then opencode, then ohmypi, then codex, finally back on Cursor now because I think they cracked the UX for what great dev looks like. The grok 4.5 fast model + cursor ergonomics is insanely good!
The cost of me moving around these different AI models and harnesses was pretty much 0.
by sergiotapia - agreed, my F500 company switched off claude code to copilot in 30 days. All 5k+ engineers. That is the fastest migration i've ever witnessed. This includes switching all our agents from Claude SDK to Copilot SDK.by bushbaba
- I think they stickiness is less about the difficulty of switching and more about the lack of desire. I’ve been using Claude since day one, it works well and I’m happy, I like it. I’m sure Codex is good too. Switching from one to the other certainly isn’t going to be a game changer, the discourse shows me the differences are marginal.
Probably the only reasons I would seek change are economical.
by solumunus - Have you ever worked with a non-programmer and helped them setup their AI workflows?
You install MCP connectors, specific skills, work around model/harness quirks, set security boundaries etc.
It's a lot of work, and most people will never want to change it once they have it working.
by nl - Same here. I flip flop between them. Most people I know who have access to both, technical or not, are doing the same. They’re just too close and sometimes one does what you want better than the other.by IAmGraydon
- For personal use I agree.
For companies, these decisions are very sticky. Companies go through a lot of red tape to get anything purchased and approved, then they discourage change because it's a lot of work.
So the product that gets a foothold in a company sticks for a long time.
Then a couple years later a sales person convinces an exec that they can save some money by switching, so the switching game begins. Not necessarily motivated by the better product, mostly the price. My wife's company keeps switching their tools out from under everyone every year or two. Just when they get everything stabilized and everyone familiar with the new tool, some new contract is signed that moves them all to some other company's suite.
by Aurornis - I operate an analytics site (pretty big one B2B where client's backend feeds data into our system), and we see tons of traffic originating from northwestern China (Xinjiang) from Shenzhen Tencent Computer Systems Company Limited.
There are also half a dozen other companies from China continuously hammering our clients’ websites.
I was wondering, what's in that cold dessert? Low and behold satellite imaging shows massive datacenter build outs, very cheap solar energy.
Few months ago something happened and the Geo location on data on those IP now shows "Shanghai" or "Shenzhen". A way to cover tracks? But mapping latency still points to fact that nodes behind these IPs are still operating around Xinjaing region
credit:
'You Can't Cheat Time: Finding foes and yourself with latency trilateration' https://youtu.be/_iAffzWxexA HN user: lopoc
Shenzhen vs Xinxiang is hard to do using this technique but Shanghai vs Xinxiang does show difference.
Assuming that China only distills is a huge mistake.
It’s no longer some backward place that does low value copying. Look at companies like ByteDance and Xiaomi.
Chinese companies aren’t just distilling, they’re acquiring data in the same way American companies did by paying people and crawling the internet.
The way I understand it, China has a few large companies that crawl the web at a rapid rate and build corpora. The government essentially wants select few companies to do this and then make the data available to other strategic companies operating within China.
Then there are data aggregators that buy data from apps, websites, and services, as well as systems like OpenRouter or Cursor, where companies can learn from the “traces” of coding agents, chats, and so on.
This massively reduces costs, as smaller companies like DeepSeek don’t have to do their own crawling or acquire data from 100s of websites and coding agents etc....
There are also companies in China that buy American LLM APIs and proxy them to companies within China. So, there could be 10,000+ companies using American AI products, while China logs all of this, understands how they’re being used, and trains on their traces.
- What does this line mean “ the web at a rapid rate and build corpora.” , what are they trying to do? Suck up data for training AI or something else?by prox
- I thought you got the location from BGP registration, then IMHO the before/after are both correct, it might be datacenter in Xinjiang belongs to Tencent.by feisuzhu
- And, non-state run Chinese companies are just like companies in US, they usually don't joint forces to maintain a common infrastructure, if they can build moat (or at least be in leading position for a period of time), they do it, sharing crawl dataset is no go.by feisuzhu
- Releasing open weights that can approach frontier level intelligence (irrespective of number of tokens burned) is just a way of telling the world that anyone, even China, can serve frontier level inference if they have the chips and warm shells to do so.
What is stopping China from gaining a majority market share, then, in terms of serving inference?
AI Sovereignty -- yes
Cybersecurity concerns -- yes
Latency -- no, unlike previous emerging IT workload types , inference does not have strong latency requirements. eg 1s of additional network latency doesn't matter to a 15 min, 10-turn agent session.
Cost -- ultimately this comes down to a nations ability to plug chips into warm shells. which forks into geopolitical / trade on the chips side and energy scalability and modularity on the warm-shell side. Even if you call geopolitical / trade a toss-up, China has the US beat HANDILY on the energy front, yearly they are deploying 10x power to their grid relative to the US, which is shooting itself in the foot at every possible moment.
IMHO chip tech will travel across borders, absent a breakthrough in analog inference, energy scalability will ultimately dominate.
by nateburke - > The defining characteristic of a commodity is that it is fungible: a gallon of oil is a gallon of oil; a ton of copper is a ton of copper; a bushel of wheat is a bushel of wheat.
The concept of “commodity” as defined above is a model, a simplified abstract representation of reality, but that does not match the reality perfectly (the map != the territory).
The author claims that a token isn't literally an ideal commodity, but neither is oil or wheat, many factors influence their real value (intrinsic properties, location, available storage at production, expected delivery date, etc.) so that no two gallons of oil in different contracts have the same price.
Is treating “tokens” as a commodity a worse model than treating oil this way? It depends who you ask! I'm pretty sure that a chemist working at a refinery would be more happy to see tokens being felt with like a commodity by his company than if they started viewing crude oil like one.
(Overall, there's way too much economism in that post, and way too few facts, and as a result the argument makes very little sense, the author basically wrote that both OpenAI and Anthropic are drowning in cash right now because compute scarcity means the price must be significantly higher than the marginal cost…)
by stymaar - Yeah I bumped on this as well. Contra the author's claim, the analogy to energy commodities seems very direct to me. Natural gas is not useful in and of itself, what is useful is the energy or aggregates created from it, and those have very different levels of efficiency. Exactly like Sol more efficiently converting tokens into intelligence than Kimi, a combined cycle gas plant converts gas into electricity more efficiently than a simple cycle gas plant. But this does not imply that gas is not a commodity. And both the more efficient and less efficient kinds of plants have large markets; they just target different trade offs.
Edit to add: I think what he's saying is more like "tokens aren't the interesting commodity, 'intelligence' is", which makes more sense. To carry on my gas and electricity analogy, I would say the same thing about gas being the less interesting commodity than electricity, because electricity can be used for a broader set of useful things. But both things are commodities, despite one being an input and the other being an output in this case, and the conversion efficiency is one very important consideration, but not the only one.
by sanderjd - Lets do "who's afraid of US models" version:
* Me, as an individual, because I might not be able to pay price hikes, because my revenue (salary) is much lower than what they want and I can't support my expenses via huge bank loans.
* Again, me as a new entrant to the industry, LLMs are basically pay-to-play games, again related to price hikes, new entrants might not be able to afford paying those prices 24/7 - which you need when learning new things.
* Any non-US company, US can block the models which can disrupt the whole business.
* Even some US companies, for example if you operate in EU and EU somewhat changes their mind and follow the ICC and require you to stop working with Netanyahu (war criminal as per ICC), then following laws in EU, might create trouble to your whole business.
by throwaw12 - For me, the most important factor is:
* All modern AI is a perfect front for harvesting material for processing by NSA/GCHQ.
Given the criminal US' 5-eyes/9-eyes apparatus' atrocious war crimes and human rights records, this is reason enough to eschew American AI 'products'.
I'll use the AI created by the culture that lifts a billion people out of poverty first, not that from the culture that murders children every 15 minutes and lies to itself about it ..
by aa-jv - in simple terms closed models are rugpull waiting to spring at unsuspecting users, it's like you take all worst components of terminal capitalism (including price cartels), subscriptions relying on almost monopolistic dependency and microsoft/uber models of hugging competition to death to remain only provider and dictate all conditionsby kiicia
- Me as in "Unfortunately, Claude is only available in certain regions right now"
DeepSeek, Kimi, Xiaomi Mimo, Qwen, Minimax, GLM, Hy3 and Ernie are always available, and I can't be happier
by Kuyawa - I think your second point touches on a bigger concern for small businesses.
US labs have consistently demonstrated their intention to paywall higher intelligence. Eventually the paywall for “hyper-intelligence” will set a bar so high that average small businesses simply won’t be able to afford the bill of what is used by the top corporations to keep themselves at the top. That’s already starting, when it comes to the volumes of tokens top corporations are burning.
This is a feature of the system corporations want to establish and OAI/Anthropic are happy to oblige. 10% of a trillion dollar company is the same as 10% of 1,000,000 million dollar small businesses. Whose hitch would they rather ride, and which size customer easier to obtain to meet their revenue goal?
Not to mention, it would certainly be possible for the EU and other world powers to equally disincentivize use of US labs as a data security risk, since our top models are impossible to run in private lab environments without specialized agreements and there no access to the model weights for auditing. As best as I can tell, AI regulation is a dangerous game that is a hair away from isolationism.
In my opinion, Google is one of the few hopes in this area. There is still a paywall, but I feel like they are the closest thing to a Chinese lab we have (for frontier) in terms of their targets (real business use cases) and they actually have both the infra and already have a pipeline for small businesses into their products; they already have the wide non-AI customer base to leverage unlike Anthropic and OpenAI whose only product requires convincing people to use their (more expensive) AI.
by therealpygon - > Lets do "who's afraid of US models" version
Ah, cultural nuances. The title "Who's Afraid Of Chinese Models" is a riff on "Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf" which itself is a play on the song "Who's Afraid Of The Big Bad Wolf".
The title essentially means that the chinese models are being portrayed as the big bad wolf; but are they really the threat or are american frontier labs afraid of competition and commoditization?
It's also somewhat ironic because the author says that there is something to be feared -that western innovation will become dependent on chinese models, especially for cyber, if the american ones are restricted or unavailable.
by ninjagoo - Also me, as someone who is living in a place that US may drop bombs on because the models may think it is a military target, or even a higher priority target like a girls school.
- > Any non-US company, US can block the models which can disrupt the whole business.
And read your data, see CLOUD act, PATRIOT act etc. etc.
No longer a theoretical risk in today's US political environment.
by traceroute66 - Also me, as someone who lives in Greenland, Canada, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc. China is not threatening to invade, USA is.by 1over137
- The people who are most afraid of Chinese models are the VCs who poured into Anthropic and OpenAI at astronomically high valuations. Anthropic is valued at $1.2T and OpenAI is targeting $850B. These astronomical valuations were built on the premise that these labs would generate massive profits from premium API pricing, but the Chinese labs are completely undercutting this strategy by releasing excellent open models for free. If the frontier labs are forced to cut prices and join the race to the bottom in token prices, these valuations are unjustified, and VCs will face enormous (paper) losses.by tristanj
- I guess I shouldn't try to buy shares of OpenAI on the private market...by fnord77
- We both know the answer. Write offs. If your fund was not in AI heavy you’d have no investors.by testbjjl
- I think everyone understands models will be a commodity.
Its the user base (with ads and upselling) and proprietary wrappers which will make money for typical customer.
Even enterprise customers arent going to be spending a lot on tokens. Once labs no longer have to subsidize trainings tokens costs will drop 10x and once models get burned on chips costs will drop 10x more and you physically won't be able to burn significant number of tokens unless you're deliberately trying to.
by wordpad - Good. Over the past few years, VCs have proven that they’re warmongering psychopaths. Hopefully China puts every last one of the Palantir/Flock/Anduril class out of business.by lorecore