Editing Blog/2025-12-04/Coders And Conversationalists Switch Places (section)

== What They're Good At ==

Overall, the cumulative effect isn't particularly significant. For most things, I use LLMs as a sophisticated search tool and a hypothesis generation machine. They are both very good at these. ChatGPT-5.1 now has the unfortunate problem that it can no longer quote certain texts reliably, like when you offer a document and suggest it find quotes regarding a subject you did not know was sensitive.

For code generation, they are both exceptional. I use codex when I've got a hairy problem to tackle that will need some time, but Claude's tool use is exceptional so I like it to spin on things that it can be grounded on.

And Nano Banana is completely unmatched when it comes to drawing line diagrams, which is something I get a lot of use out of it for.