Claude Code is the ChatGPT moment repeated and awful news for software stocks | Hacker News Reader

Claude Code is the ChatGPT moment repeated and awful news for software stocks

sherwood.news

20 pointsnadis44 comments

This is really odd. They are incomparable in terms of the scope that these companies have.

I have used all major tools: OpenAI (chat, api), Google Gemini (ai studio, api, cli, antigravity) and Claude (chat, code and api). Mostly for coding issues to solve.

Claude Code gives usable results almost instantly for small scripts and it can go live. Gemini CLI tells me that it doesn't have this and that - and I have tried pushing Gemini to deliver production-quality code. No chance.

I use the same style of coding instructions for all tools.

But difference is in hours. I had a Claude session - result was in minutes, Gemini - hour and in many rounds.

On the other side, Gemini Canvas is really powerful as it makes usable app/tool inside Gemini so you don’t have to know how to run Python or PHP.

And OpenAI has very powerful chat.

So all of them seem to have different focus groups…

I tend to agree, but was curious to hear others' thoughts. My background is more product / software, less market prediction and performance so I really wasn't sure what to make of this.

This article makes no sense. Wouldn't software companies make more money if Claude Code is good, as they have to pay less to the SDEs?

Genuinely confused here.

why would you pay for software you can generate for free?

Try generating Figma through Claude Code before you can say that. Classic software is full of human ingenuity and replicating each feature looks easy on the surface, but when you get into it, it slowly becomes impossible.

Note: Figma was just an example of a complex software.

Figma is old-world technology. The future is on-demand LLM image generation.

> The future is on-demand LLM image generation.

Why even generate an image then. Why don I just use dribbble / behance and pick the best design

So you're going to generate Quickbooks on the fly every time you need to make an accounting journal entry?

Why would you pay for a meal you could make at home?

Because I have neither the time nor inclination to make it at home right now. I have other stuff I need to do.

The theory (which I don't really think stands up) is that software companies will lose value because everyone just gets an LLM to generate them the software they need instead.

This theory falls apart because I dont think a regular internet user can just generate something complex like Photoshop/Figma/Final Cut Pro via LLMs.

Even hardcore top level engineer wont be able to do it just via LLMs

Also, all the biggest software companies run network services. You could download your own search engine forever, but it doesn't mean anything without the Google data centers and crawlers. Likewise there's a million open source twitter clones, but without the users they have no real utility to the average person. The era of shrink wrap software has been over for a long time.

There are variants of the theory that are actually pretty sound, but it's more about the critical mass open source will achieve and the reduced friction that agents will bring to self hosting.

What closed source software company can compete on features against the entire world's collective agents? What sales pitch do hosted saas vendors have when you can spin up a container for your open source saas of choice pre-configured, and the agent can tweak stuff and offload ops efficiently? We're ~2 years away from this reality.

A common belief is that an experienced software developer steers AI (whether via Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Opencode, browser et al) much more effectively than a "layperson". I concur.

I doubt any single engineer of any level can steer AI into building something complex like lets say Photoshop.

Most of the recent completely vibe coded projects dont do anything as complex as that, they are usually just tiny websites or some slop tui

I disagree, particularly if the engineer is skilled in and directly controls the architectural compartmentalization of the project. I do not see that limit here.

If its that easy why haven't we seen a single attempt being anywhere close?

There's also no technical limit preventing a single engineer without AI from implementing Photoshop all by themselves. The question is can they compete with Adobe.

A single person company wouldn't have to compete with Adobe, for example Photopea is profitable and sustainable project made by just one person. My point was that even Photopea is yet to be copied by any of the engineers using coding agents, let alone the full version of Photoshop.

How much is “much more”. It is still a number.

I do think coding agents are very important and will have widespread impact. But this article seems like rather vague hand-waving about the future?

I thought the concluding quote was the most interesting part but I also am not super versed in market prediction (I sort of assume it is hand-wavy in general?). I shared it because I was curious if folks with more insight might have better perspectives than I. But it also might just be too vague an article to effectively ground that kind of conversation - I'm not sure.

Perhaps journalists are just trying to make fetch^^^^^Claude happen, but I've noticed it popping up a bit more (The Atlantic): https://archive.is/6YvPh

My opinion is that Claude Code is the first viable leverage of the LLM technology so comparing it to a 'ChatGPT moment' is odd to me.

Analyst slop, he's trying to say that Claude code is like the moment that chatgpt was released and everyone went apeshit for AI. The future he's describing is vaguely plausible in a narrow set of use cases a decade from now but he needs to justify the paycheck so here we are.

So I’m not proud to admit that for my recent work (which has been 90% data science stuff in Julia) I’ve been still just using Gemini via the webpage for coding and it’s pretty effective for me, what is the most user friendly way to get started with Claude Code? Is there a nice VSCode integration out there?

Yes you can install it as a VSCode extension or use it from terminal. Effect is same.

But for your use-case, I would think Gemini cli is better, since gemini does seem to excel in Data Analytics tasks for me.

Yes, admittedly, since the Gemini 3 release, I have switched to using Gemini 3 via Opencode and the Gemini CLI, largely.

Claude Code is a command line CLI. There are many like it -- Opencode, aider, Gemini CLI -- you launch the CLI in a software project directory and ask it to code interactively. It can navigate source files and create them. I prefer the approach to Cursor, however, there is a vscode extension for Claude Code as well: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/vs-code

I see this with the disproportionate amount of hype around "Claude Code" specifically vs. AI coding in general. Eventually people realized that there was AI chat beyond the brand-name "Chat GPT" and that Gemini was just as good (and often better).

I tend to agree, although I do think Claude Code specifically is having a moment for AI for software development. There are a lot of similar products (OpenAI's Codex, Google's Gemini CLI, etc.) but none work quite as well - yet anyways. Sort of orthogonal to the potential market impact, which I personally am not really sure how to interpret.

Get ready folks, another breathless hype wave incoming!

Don't get me wrong, I somewhat agree that there's been a sea change with Opus 4.5 in the usefulness of Claude Code, but it stills goes off the rails at the drop of a hat in the dumbest and most frustrating ways. Actually trying to use it to develop even a nontrivial greenfield project from scratch requires carefully reviewing its code to make sure it stays on track.

> "Actually trying to use it to develop even a nontrivial greenfield project from scratch requires carefully reviewing its code to make sure it stays on track."

Completely agreed!

> Just 3% of the time does SPY gain 1% while software stocks drop 5% in a month

I would like to direct the author to a high school statistics class.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...

Fair point!

Vague nonsense

What felt vague about it? Personally while I'm not sure how to interpret the potential market impact (or lack there of) I thought it was an interesting hypothesis, especially the quote at the end:

> “One day, the successor to Claude Code will make a superhuman interface available to everyone. And if Tokens were TCP/IP, Claude Code is the first genuine website built in the age of AI. And this is going to hurt a large part of the software industry.”

“I believe that all software must leave information work as soon as possible. I believe that the future role of software will not have much ‘information processing’, i.e., analysis. Claude Code or Agent-Next will be doing the information synthesis, the GUI, and the workflow. That will be ephemeral and generated for the use at hand. Anyone should be able to access the information they want in the format they want and reference the underlying data.

What I’m trying to say is that the traditional differentiation metrics will change. Faster workflows, better UIs, and smoother integrations will all become worthless, while persistent information, a la an API, will become extremely valuable.”

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