My current AI stack as of July 2026: three daily podcasts, about eight tools, what I subscribe to, and the one job where Claude still wins by a wide margin.
The two things Claude keeps winning have something in common: neither has a scoreboard. Reasoning and coding are benchmarked publicly, so effort concentrates there and the field converges. Writing and slide structure are judged on preference, which means no lab can prove it closed the gap and no buyer can prove it didn't. That's why your folder of side-by-side examples is doing work no evaluation suite currently does, and why the difference is likely to outlast the ones that are measured.
It's a great observation. I constantly test the models writing abilities (I guess I would lightly classify it as "taste"). They continually get better but I find that Claude just consistently does a better job for me in the type of writing that I like and it follows directions on writing exceptionally well. I also find it delivers a higher level of polish on powerpoint, word docs, and excel files too. Even though the latest version of ChatGPT can do a "good" job on building them - Claude is just better. Thank you for the comment - I appreciate it.
Good question. I don’t actually. I’ve been extremely happy with Opus (since 4.5). I don’t find Sonnet to be a great writer. I use Fable for planning and Opus for execution. Glad you asked!
The two things Claude keeps winning have something in common: neither has a scoreboard. Reasoning and coding are benchmarked publicly, so effort concentrates there and the field converges. Writing and slide structure are judged on preference, which means no lab can prove it closed the gap and no buyer can prove it didn't. That's why your folder of side-by-side examples is doing work no evaluation suite currently does, and why the difference is likely to outlast the ones that are measured.
It's a great observation. I constantly test the models writing abilities (I guess I would lightly classify it as "taste"). They continually get better but I find that Claude just consistently does a better job for me in the type of writing that I like and it follows directions on writing exceptionally well. I also find it delivers a higher level of polish on powerpoint, word docs, and excel files too. Even though the latest version of ChatGPT can do a "good" job on building them - Claude is just better. Thank you for the comment - I appreciate it.
Give that good doggo some head scratches.
Do you find Fable is better at writing than the lower priced models?
Good question. I don’t actually. I’ve been extremely happy with Opus (since 4.5). I don’t find Sonnet to be a great writer. I use Fable for planning and Opus for execution. Glad you asked!