11Claude

Starting with the one I use myself, so I'm not pretending to be a neutral reviewer.

Claude is what the site you're reading was built with. All of it, from the first line. I picked it for two things: it holds a long task better than anything else, and it's more honest than the rest. If a task is bad it will say so instead of cheerfully doing it.

There are several models inside, and they have literary names. Haiku is fast and cheap, for small stuff. Sonnet is the everyday workhorse. Opus is the heavy artillery. Above them sits Fable, the most powerful one open to everyone, but you only get it properly on the Max plan, and the latest Opus is nearly as good anyway. No need to study them: take whatever it offers by default, that's almost always the right call.

Claude Code deserves its own mention. It's the agent from the last stage: it edits files and runs commands itself. It lives in the terminal, and also in the Claude app under the Code tab, where there's no black window at all. Looks terrifying for ten minutes, then you can't remember how you lived before.

One downside, but a real one: limits. Pro costs twenty dollars like everyone else's, but if you sit in it all day the limits run out fast, and your hand reaches for Max at a hundred.