I agree with your overall message - rapid growth appears to encourage competition and forces companies to put their best foot forward.

However, unfortunately, I cannot shower much praise on Claude 3.7. And if you (or anyone) asks why - 3.7 seems much better than 3.5, surely? - Then I’m moderately sure that you use Claude much more for coding than for any kind of conversation. In my opinion, even 3.5 Haiku (which is available for free during high loads) is better than 3.7 Sonnet.

Here’s a simple test. Try asking 3.7 to intuitively explain anything technical - say, mass dominated vs spring dominated oscillations. I’m a mechanical engineer who studied this stuff and I could not understand 3.7’s analogies.

I understand that coders are the largest single group of Claude’s users, but Claude went from being my most used app to being used only after both chatgpt and Gemini, something that I absolutely regret.

> Being a software engineer is tough.

No, it isn't. Software engineering is one of the easiest careers. We are so coddled that we think what is described in this post is tough, that alone is evidence of how not tough our career is.

I've recently given up on the idea of hiring genius level engineers for jobs that require building CRUD applications 80% of their time. It's a waste of money, a waste of the talent pool, a disservice to the candidate and a future risk to the company as such individuals will inevitably get bored and start over-engineering things to keep their minds occupied. For most engineers (but not all), being able to correctly write create, update, delete and query operations at the database level and API level, and being able to call APIs from the front-end level, with proper error handling, with a decent approach to debugging, is enough.