Weirdly, I find a higher signal to noise in this analogy than looking at benchmarks these days.
If you let your inner fanboy rest for a moment you realize Gemini 3, Claude Opus 4.5, and GPT 5.2 are all amazing. If two of them disappeared tomorrow, my AI assisted productiveness wouldn't change.
The 3% difference on benchmark X doesn't mean anything anymore. It's probably more helpful to compare them on character traits instead of numbers.
My one word to describe Claude would be "pleasant". It's just so nice to communicate with. GPT/Codex would be the "thorough". It finds and thinks of stuff the others don't. For Gemini 3, the jury is still out. It might be the smart kid on the block that's still a bit rough around the edges, but given that it's a preview things might change soon.
Mine definitely would. This sounds so clichéd, but Claude (Opus 4.5, but also the others) just "gets how I think" better. I've tried Gemini 3 and GPT 5.2 and didn't like them at all -- not when I know I can have Claude. I mostly code Python + Django, so it could also be from that.
Gemini 3 has this extremely annoying habit of bleeding its reasoning process onto comments which are hard to read and not very human-like (they're not "reasoning", they're "question for the sake of questioning", which I get as a part of the process, but not as a comment in the code!). I've seen it do things like these many times:
# Because so and so and so and so we must do x(param1=True, param2=False)
# Actually! No, wait! It is better if we do x(param1=True, param2=True)
x(param1=True, param2=True, param3=False) # This one is even better!
Beyond that, it just does not produce what I consider good python code. I daily-drove Gemini 2.5 before I realized how good Anthropic's models were (or perhaps before they punched back after 2.5?) and haven't been able to go back.
As for GPT 5.2, I just feel like it doesn't really follow my instructions or way of thinking. Like it's dead set on following whatever best practices it has learned, and if I disagree with them, well tough luck. Plus, and I have no better way of saying this, it's just rude and cold, and I hate it for it.
I recently discovered Claude, and it does much better than Codex or Gemini for python code.
Gemini seems to lean to making everything a script, disconnected from the larger vision. Sure, it uses our existing libraries, but the files it writes and functions it makes can’t be integrated back in.
Codex is fast. Very fast. Which makes it great for a conversational UI, and answering questions about the codebasw or proposing alternatives but when it writes code it’s too clever. The code is valid but not pythonic. Like the invention of one line functions just to optimize a situation that had could be parameterized in three places.
Claude on the other hand makes code that is simple to understand and has enough architecture that you can lift it out and use as is without too much rewriting.
I don’t find much value in these kinds of analogies. First, I have to rewatch all 8 Harry Potter films to remind myself who’s who, and by then the models will have updated and it will be out of date.
Weirdly, I find a higher signal to noise in this analogy than looking at benchmarks these days.
If you let your inner fanboy rest for a moment you realize Gemini 3, Claude Opus 4.5, and GPT 5.2 are all amazing. If two of them disappeared tomorrow, my AI assisted productiveness wouldn't change.
The 3% difference on benchmark X doesn't mean anything anymore. It's probably more helpful to compare them on character traits instead of numbers.
My one word to describe Claude would be "pleasant". It's just so nice to communicate with. GPT/Codex would be the "thorough". It finds and thinks of stuff the others don't. For Gemini 3, the jury is still out. It might be the smart kid on the block that's still a bit rough around the edges, but given that it's a preview things might change soon.
Mine definitely would. This sounds so clichéd, but Claude (Opus 4.5, but also the others) just "gets how I think" better. I've tried Gemini 3 and GPT 5.2 and didn't like them at all -- not when I know I can have Claude. I mostly code Python + Django, so it could also be from that.
Gemini 3 has this extremely annoying habit of bleeding its reasoning process onto comments which are hard to read and not very human-like (they're not "reasoning", they're "question for the sake of questioning", which I get as a part of the process, but not as a comment in the code!). I've seen it do things like these many times:
Beyond that, it just does not produce what I consider good python code. I daily-drove Gemini 2.5 before I realized how good Anthropic's models were (or perhaps before they punched back after 2.5?) and haven't been able to go back.As for GPT 5.2, I just feel like it doesn't really follow my instructions or way of thinking. Like it's dead set on following whatever best practices it has learned, and if I disagree with them, well tough luck. Plus, and I have no better way of saying this, it's just rude and cold, and I hate it for it.
I recently discovered Claude, and it does much better than Codex or Gemini for python code.
Gemini seems to lean to making everything a script, disconnected from the larger vision. Sure, it uses our existing libraries, but the files it writes and functions it makes can’t be integrated back in.
Codex is fast. Very fast. Which makes it great for a conversational UI, and answering questions about the codebasw or proposing alternatives but when it writes code it’s too clever. The code is valid but not pythonic. Like the invention of one line functions just to optimize a situation that had could be parameterized in three places.
Claude on the other hand makes code that is simple to understand and has enough architecture that you can lift it out and use as is without too much rewriting.
So which of the AIs is the one that'd give Dobby a Glock?
I don’t find much value in these kinds of analogies. First, I have to rewatch all 8 Harry Potter films to remind myself who’s who, and by then the models will have updated and it will be out of date.
Gemini is absolutely not Gryffindor since it auto-opts users into training AI on their codebases without informed consent
I don’t know, that’s pretty daring and determined to me.