Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Claude Code

> "[..] in developing our reasoning models, we’ve optimized somewhat less for math and computer science competition problems, and instead shifted focus towards real-world tasks that better reflect how businesses actually use LLMs.”

This is good news. OpenAI seems to be aiming towards "the smartest model," but in practice, LLMs are used primarily as learning aids, data transformers, and code writers.

Balancing "intelligence" with "get shit done" seems to be the sweet spot, and afaict one of the reasons the current crop of developer tools (Cursor, Windsurf, etc.) prefer Claude 3.5 Sonnet over 4o.

Claude 3.5 has been fantastic in Windsurf. However, it does cost credits. DeepSeek V3 is now available in Windsurf at zero credit cost, which was a major shift for the company. Great to have variable options either way.

I’d highly recommend anyone check out Windsurf’s Cascade feature for agentic-like code writing and exploration. It helped save me many hours in understanding new codebases and tracing data flows.

DeepSeek’s models are vastly overhyped (FWIW I have access to them via Kagi, Windsurf, and Cursor - I regularly run the same tests on all three). I don’t think it matters that V3 is free when even R1 with its extra compute budget is inferior to Claude 3.5 by a large margin - at least in my experience in both bog standard React/Svelte frontend code and more complex C++/Qt components. After only half an hour of using Claude 3.7, I find the code output is superior and the thinking output is in a completely different universe (YMMV and caveat emptor).

For example, DeepSeek’s models almost always smash together C++ headers and code files even with Qt, which is an absolutely egregious error due to the meta-object compiler preprocessor step. The MOC has been around for at least 15 years and is all over the training data so there’s no excuse.

Hey there! I’m a fellow Qt developer and I really like your takes. Would you like to connect? My socials are on my profile.

We’ve already connected! Last year I think, because I was interested in your experience building a block editor (this was before your blog post on the topic). I’ve been meaning to reconnect for a few weeks now but family life keeps getting in the way - just like it keeps getting in the way of my implementing that block editor :)

I especially want to publish and send you the code for that inspector class and selector GUI that dumps the component hierarchy/state, QML source, and screenshot for use with Claude. Sadly I (and Claude) took some dumb shortcuts while implementing the inspector class that both couples it to proprietary code I can’t share and hardcodes some project specific bits, so it’s going to take me a bit of time to extricate the core logic.

I haven’t tried it with 3.7 but based on my tree-sitter QSyntaxHighlighter and Markdown QAbstactListModel tests so far, it is significantly better and I suspect the work Anthropic has done to train it for computer use will reap huge rewards for this use case. I’m still experimenting with the nitty gritty details but I think it will also be a game changer for testing in general, because combining computer use, gammaray-like dumps, and the Spix e2e testing API completes the full circle on app context.