Vibe Coding: Why Claude Feels Senior and GPT-4 Feels Junior

Ask GPT-4 to write a React component. It gives you a perfect, textbook example. Ask Claude 3.5 Sonnet. It gives you a component that handles edge cases, uses modern hooks, and adds a comment explaining why it chose that specific pattern. GPT-4 feels like a brilliant Junior Dev with StackOverflow open. Claude feels like a Senior Dev who's seen production fires.

It's not just about the 200k token window. It's about how the model weighs that context. Claude seems to maintain a 'mental model' of the entire codebase better. It remembers that one utility function you defined in a different file three turns ago, whereas GPT-4 often suffers from 'needle in a haystack' loss.

When we use tools like cursor or claude-dev, we are essentially performing rejection sampling. We reject the bad code and accept the good. With Claude, the rejection rate is significantly lower. Why?

1. Less Verbosity: It doesn't explain const vs let to you. 2. Intent Inference: It guesses what you meant, not just what you said. 3. Refactoring Capability: It's better at 'move this logic to a hook' without breaking the rest of the file.

// The Claude Difference: nuanced error handling
// GPT-4 might just catch(e) { console.error(e) }

try {
  await riskyOperation();
} catch (error) {
  if (error instanceof NetworkError) {
    // Claude often suggests retry logic automatically
    await exponentialBackoff(riskyOperation);
  } else {
    // And structured logging
    logger.error({ error, context: 'riskyOperation' }, 'Critical failure');
    throw error;
  }
}

GPT-4 (and 4o) has a tendency to be lazy. '// ... rest of code remains same'. This is likely an inference cost optimization by OpenAI. Claude is more willing to write out the full file when necessary, or give you a surgical diff that actually applies correctly. For now, the Vibe King is Claude.