Claude

Why Claude?

Claude from Anthropic is an AI assistant built with an emphasis on accuracy, safety, and the ability to work with extensive context. After a year of intensive use, I consider it the best choice for professional work — especially programming, document analysis, and structured tasks.

Model lineup

Claude Opus — the most powerful model. Excels at complex reasoning tasks, code analysis, and situations that demand deep understanding of context. Slower, more expensive, but the results are noticeably better.

Claude Sonnet — the best performance/price ratio. For 90% of tasks, Sonnet is sufficient and significantly faster than Opus. I recommend it as the default model.

Claude Haiku — the fastest and cheapest. Ideal for simple classifications, data extraction, and real-time applications where latency matters.

Extended thinking

Claude Opus and Sonnet let you turn on explicit reasoning — the model "thinks" before answering and shows you its thought process. Unlike OpenAI o1/o3, where the chain-of-thought is hidden, with Claude you see the whole sequence.

In practice, this fundamentally improves:

• Math and logic problems
• Debugging complex code
• Deciding between multiple options
• Analyzing contracts and legal texts

Claude Code — killer feature for developers

Claude Code is a CLI tool that changes the way I program. It's not autocomplete like Copilot — it's an agent that understands the whole project:

• Navigates the repository and understands the structure
• Writes and edits files based on high-level instructions
• Runs tests and fixes the errors it finds
• Commits and creates PRs with reasonable commit messages
• MCP integrations for access to databases, APIs, Figma, and other tools

This site was built entirely via Claude Code — from scaffold through components to the Docker configuration and deploy on Vercel.

API and integrations

The Claude API is straightforward and well-documented. It supports:

• Messages API with system prompts and multi-turn conversations
• Vision — analysis of images, screenshots, documents
• Tool use — structured calls to external functions
• Streaming for real-time answers
• Batches for bulk processing

Works great with the Vercel AI SDK — one line of code to switch between Claude, GPT, or Gemini.

Comparison with ChatGPT

| Area | Claude | ChatGPT | |------|--------|---------| | Accuracy | Higher, fewer hallucinations | Good, but occasionally makes things up | | Code | Excellent, especially with Code | Very good with Copilot | | Long documents | Excels (200k) | Average (128k, weaker retrieval) | | Creativity | Good | Better for creative writing | | Ecosystem | Smaller, growing | GPT Store, plugins | | Multimodality | Text + images | Text + images + audio + video |

Who is Claude for?

• Developers — Claude Code is a game changer
• Analysts — accurate work with data and documents
• Lawyers/consultants — reliable analysis of extensive texts
• Marketers — consistent and factually accurate content
• Anyone who needs reliability over creativity

Verdict

Claude is the best AI assistant for professional work. The combination of accuracy, long context, extended thinking, and Claude Code makes it a tool I can no longer imagine my workflow without. If you're a developer or work with text and data, try it — and start with Sonnet.