OpenAI Has Some Catching Up to Do

Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up to get it in your inbox.

This morning I hit my usage limit on Codex, OpenAI’s competitor to Claude Code. I’m building an agent-native Markdown editor for the Every team. It’s exactly the kind of complex, detail-heavy project where Codex shines.

But this week was an exception. Most of my coding happens in Claude Code now—and I’m not alone.

On Tuesday night, we had about 20 founders over to the office for a dinner on the future of AI. I asked everyone what their daily driver AI tools were. Of the programmers, almost everyone said Claude Code with Opus 4.5. The lone holdout was Naveen Naidu—general manager of Monologue—who still prefers Codex.

A month ago, the room would have been split between Codex CLI, GPT 5.1 in Cursor, and Claude Code—with some Droid sprinkled in.

A year ago, the whole room would have been using GPT models.

This might not surprise you if you’ve been on X lately. It seems the only thing on everyone’s mind is Claude Code. This audience is obviously a narrow slice of the market, but it’s the same slice that was excited about ChatGPT when it first came out.

So, what explains Claude Code and Opus’s sudden rise in startup circles? It’s not better marketing. Sure, Anthropic has their “thinking” caps. But compared to the high-profile livestreams we’ve gotten used to for important model releases, they barely promoted Opus 4.5 at launch. Instead, it’s who they decided to build for—and how that’s shaping the direction of the whole tech industry.

How Claude Code happened

When Anthropic first released Claude Code along with Sonnet 3.7 in late February of 2025, it was a bold bet. At a time when existing code editors were firmly stuck in building AI agents crammed into a sidebar, they went terminal-first and bypassed the code editor altogether. It signaled, “We’re moving to a world where code doesn’t matter.” At the time, we wrote that while it was incredible at vibe coding new projects from scratch, it wasn’t yet good enough to work with large codebases on its own. Still, we were impressed.

Become a paid subscriber to Every to unlock this piece and learn about:

The dramatic shift in AI tool preferences among startup founders—and why nearly everyone has abandoned what they used a year ago
Why OpenAI’s bet on professional developers may be targeting a market that’s about to shrink
The unexpected reason the winner of “vibe coding” might determine how everyone works on computers