Jacob Marks

I ended Moving from ChatGPT to Claude with "more once I've actually used it." I've used it. The answer isn't simple because chat and coding are different enough to warrant separate conclusions. I'll preface this with noting that these are my observations and not scientific conclusions. Overall Claude's setup friction was real. Claude depends on more non-Anthropic services than you'd expect and Pi-hole blocks a significant number of them silently. I ended up building an allow list and publishing it before I could use Claude reliably. ChatGPT has never required any of that. I also happened to start evaluating Claude during an outage, which didn't help first impressions. Not everyone runs Pi-hole, but enough technically-minded people do that it's worth noting. Anthropic's availability is noticeably worse than OpenAI's. The status dashboard reflects a steady stream of incidents. ChatGPT is install and forget. Claude required fighting to g...

The cloud market continues to get more competitive. AWS built its early success by winning developers first. Startups and builders were willing to take risks, move fast, and trust new platforms if those platforms made their jobs easier. AWS became the default choice because it gave developers access to infrastructure and services that previously required enormous capital, time, and operational overhead. That advantage should not be taken for granted. As the market matures, competitors are closing the gap. Microsoft in particular understands something important: developers and operations professionals are often the real catalyst for cloud adoption inside an enterprise. CIOs, CTOs, and procurement teams may approve the decision, but developers and operators heavily influence which technologies ever make it that far. If AWS wants to maintain its leadership position, we cannot rely only on top-down executive relationships. We must continue to win the people who actually build and operate s...