After many years, I’m finally giving up on ChatGPT. Now Claude is my new best friend.

I've been a ChatGPT Plus subscriber pretty much since subscriptions were first available. It's been a part of my daily work flow for years, and I'll always remember giving a training on it for about 70 coworkers – their literal gasps and shouts at what it could do made me feel like I was performing a magic show. But after a disastrous attempt at building something pretty simple, I finally did what I'd been putting off for a long time, and began to explore different options. After using Claude for a bit, I think the user experience there is so much better that I've decided to jump ship on ChatGPT.

I'm a middle/high school teacher; I usually use ChatGPT for material creation, messaging parents, and planning. However, I've also used it to build some tools to help make some of my administration work more efficient. A few weeks ago I wanted to build a tool to help me get student work on paper uploaded more quickly. (Needless to say, the AI revolution has been a huge pain in the ass for teachers who need to see what kind of work students can produce on their own.) I had a plan for what I wanted, and ChatGPT helped me build scripts for a Google Sheet and Google Drive. It went well – I got 90% of what I wanted pretty quickly. Then it went off the rails.

Every time I sent another message in Chat, it froze up and I had to reload the browser tab. The responses I got led to more and more complicated code that didn't work. Every response to these errors from ChatGPT resulted in new code, refactoring everything rather than just fixing the broken part. I would have to start new chats because of the refresh issue, but then context was lost and Chat forgot what the (fairly simple) requirements of the project were. This was immensely frustrating, because it was close to what I wanted, so I ended up wasting an embarrassing amount of hours on this stupid project, trying to get to the finish line but consistently going backwards, losing functionality with every refactoring by ChatGPT.

After viciously insulting ChatGPT for its repeated failures (and the insults didn't even bring me a sense of satisfaction), I finally decided to try Claude. It gave me what I wanted in minutes. I also found its interface far superior to ChatGPT. Claude organizes things so much better than ChatGPT, and seems to be much faster. It was such a better experience that I felt a bit silly for having remained tied to ChatGPT for so long.

Despite its new releases, I feel like ChatGPT hasn't actually made much meaningful progress. It's made different versions of the same thing, but the poor user interface, the memory issues, and poor organization have all remained the same for a long time now. It's focused on meeting benchmarks that aren't actually very relevant to most users. Whatever Humanity's Last Exam is, who cares? Who's using AI to take tests like that? Claude isn't perfect, but it's so much nicer to actually use.

So bye bye ChatGPT! It would be great if you tried to make your product better in the way people actually use it, but I guess that's not your business model. Meanwhile, your competitors are making products that are better to work with. Good luck going in a different direction.