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.

Thanks! We all dogfood Claude every day to do our own work here, and solving our own pain points is more exciting to us than abstract benchmarks.

Getting things done require a lot of booksmarts, but also a lot of "street smarts" - knowing when to answer quickly, when to double back, etc

Could you tell us a bit about the coding tools you use and how you go about interacting with Claude?

We find that Claude is really good at test driven development, so we often ask Claude to write tests first and then ask Claude to iterate against the tests

Write tests (plural) first, as in write more than one failing test before making it pass?

Time to look up TDD, my friend.