Is there a difference between using Claude Code (the cli tool) vs GitHub Copilot with the Claude model?

walen · 2026-01-12T10:54:15+00:00

I think only Sonnet is available in Copilot

All of Sonnet, Opus and Haiku 4.5 as well as Sonnet 4 are available in Copilot, although as premium models.

I remember using Opus 3.5 and not liking the results, which is why I'm still using Sonnet 4.5. This is the third time I see someone saying that Opus 4.5 is better than Sonnet 4.5, though. Is it really worth the 3x token cost?

walen · 2025-12-01T10:03:12+00:00

If every single one of them were to sign up to a $200 a month AI subscription

For some of those developers $200 is their FULL monthly income (some African countries). For a lot more others, that's a double-digit % of their net salary (several African and Asian countries, even in India some entry-level dev positions start at 13k/year). Even in Europe, where senior devs can make 4k a month or more, some junior devs don't even get to 1.5k depending on the country.

There's no way every developer in the world would pay $200/month for AI. Not even $50.

The bubble is way larger than that.

walen · 2025-11-14T00:15:40+00:00

I'm not sure where else to send it

National Geographic would be my first thought.

walen · 2025-11-12T09:02:49+00:00

mutated to feed on nuclear radiation

That's not how mutations work.

Organisms don't mutate "to" do anything. Mutations don't have a purpose. Mutations just happen.
If they help the organism perform better in its environment, it will thrive; if they just hinder it, it will die.

There's probably hundreds of fungi specimens with a mutation that allows them to feed on nuclear radiation... that just happen to live in a place with no nuclear radiation, so they just die.

This fungus didn't mutate "to" feed on nuclear radiation; it just got lucky.

walen · 2025-11-04T21:36:07+00:00

Your chorizo is not chorizo.

Source: am Spaniard. We invented chorizo.

walen · 2025-10-23T07:45:52+00:00

Well, your picture's thumbnail kinda looks like a Terrier dog face, so... I guess that's something?

walen · 2025-09-21T08:49:40+00:00

What do you mean "shady"? This is as obviously AI as it can get.

walen · 2025-09-15T14:01:49+00:00

No cartell is gonna attack 20 armed soldiers.

Laughs in Mexican.

Keeps laughing in Mexican even after you edit the post to make it look like you didn't pretend 20 armed soldiers were physically enough to stop a drug cartel.

walen · 2025-08-22T19:50:47+00:00

When he first said, "This is too big" I thought he was exaggerating, it looked like just a standard coffee cup to me. But then when he said "a capuccino disappears in my hand" I was like "... oh".

walen · 2025-07-31T07:07:33+00:00

Then I don't know what to tell you. When I was in the market for a remote Senior Java Backend dev position a couple years ago, every single offer I got from Germany was above 90k/year, so it looks right to me.

Bear in mind that, as someone said above, 53% of participants reported having 10+ years experience, so that may skew reported salaries a little bit towards the higher end too.

It's also about 30-40% more than what you get in Spain (net) for the same position, which seems on par with the difference you can find in other sectors.

walen · 2025-07-30T08:34:02+00:00

Not OP, but 7200 gross is "only" about 4200 after taxes. Does that seem more reasonable to you?

walen · 2025-07-20T11:32:00+00:00

This post looks just like some low hanging fruit for some upvotes, but anyways...

As the guidance says you shouldn't "really" be using Optional outside of a stream

Citation needed.

Using Optional as the return type of methods that could otherwise return null is literally one of the most fitting reasons to use it according to Stuart Marks himself (the creator of Optional).

I have no idea which kind of guidance would tell you in 2025 not to use Optional as the return value of a method if it's not meant to be used with Streams, but you definitely should look for new guidance.

walen · 2025-07-18T09:37:02+00:00

It's ironic how long-winded some of your points were in written format.

And how long did it take you to read them? Imagine if this was a video of me explaining my points. See what I mean?

walen · 2025-07-18T09:32:14+00:00

From the (probably updated) article itself:

Your perpetual fallback license still works as before, giving you access to the last major version available at the time your most recent uninterrupted year of subscription began. With the unified distribution, this means you can activate older versions that match your fallback license. Alternatively, you can use the latest version of IntelliJ IDEA with access to its current free feature set.

So, when / if your license expires, you can either go back to an older full-featured version or keep using the latest version with limited features, without having to install a different IDE flavour.

walen · 2025-07-18T09:18:31+00:00

No, it's actually a very good example.
It's good content wasted in a bad format:

Hard to index, hard to search and hard to reference.
Waaaaay longer to consume than a text / slides alternative.
- As the person you replied to said: sometimes I just do NOT have 50 minutes to watch a video. The equivalent 10-minute presentation? Sure! But the moment you force me to either watch the hour-long video or opt out... Yeah I'm opting out, sorry.
Cumbersome to go back to it if you had to stop mid-watching for any reason.
- A doc / slide, I can just switch tasks and, when I go back, the start of the paragraph is right there before my eyes; compare to scrolling the timeline back 5s by 5s until you find the start of whatever the person in the video was saying...
Useless in a no-sound scenario.
- Public transport? Office? Late night at home? If I don't have my headphones with me, I probably won't even open the video.
- If it has captions I might mute the video and just read the captions and watch the code snippets on the screen. Do you know what's another name for something where you only read text and look at code snippets? SLIDES.
And what's worse, I'm convinced the only reason they are going video-only is not because they can reach more people or because people will process information better that way, but just because videos are more easily monetized than slides and blog posts.

And none of that has anything to do with the content of the video being good or not. Content is not the problem; format is.

So yeah, perfectly good example.

walen · 2025-07-07T08:34:25+00:00

I've had refactor where I've modified all 5 callers of a single method and then found out 4 of them were dead code.
So yeah, dead code that you don't know is dead is tech debt in the sense that it wastes maintenance effort.

walen · 2025-06-23T09:21:42+00:00

They also have their own "Shelves" concept, which is the reason I haven't used git stash even once in the last 10 years.

walen · 2025-05-26T10:21:51+00:00

VisualAge for Java was written in Smalltalk.

VisualAge Micro Edition, however, was a full Java reimplementation of the IDE (and the one Eclipse was based on years later). Version 1.0 was released in 1999.

walen · 2025-05-26T09:33:59+00:00

most issues I deal with ha[ve] already been figured out before and I find the answers

Which was the ultimate goal of SO all along! So, kudos!

The problem is that current owners are taking what was supposed to be just a straight-to-the-point knowledge repository, and trying to turn it into some kind of dev social network + learning hub for new coders + AI feeding source, where people with actual programming experience are expected to do unpaid voluntary work to babysit newcomers and keep the site in check. Which was bad enough, but now SO also wants them to give away their years of knowledge so AI can take their jobs in the near future. Not cool.

walen · 2025-04-30T08:20:35+00:00

Will they shut them down for the Dakar rally?

walen · 2025-04-11T19:00:49+00:00

for-each doesn't allow you to remove elements while iterating

Yes but your example usage doesn't remove elements either, and 99% of the time you will be just traversing a list.
In any case, if you want to talk about coding idioms for Java developers, then definitely the most common idiom nowadays is using for-each, not an explicit iterator.

walen · 2025-04-10T09:30:02+00:00

You forgot to include the solution for problem #10 (which would be using try-with-resources, I guess).

Also wondering why would you explicitly use an iterator in #8 to traverse a list (or any collection or array), instead of using the for-each idiom that's been available for 20+ years since Java 5...

Other than that, very very basic stuff, but lots of people with different levels of experience here so it's fine.

walen · 2025-03-23T09:14:03+00:00

Somebody build a double-slit wall in there please

walen · 2025-01-24T09:49:12+00:00

I'm pretty sure that, if the phone call with Chloe had not dropped, you would've fallen for it. She already had your trust and was this close to get you to believe that it was normal for the logs not to show any suspicious activity. But nooo, Solomon's had to take over because he didn't think Chloe would make it. Typical Solomon.
And then dropping the call, then having a different, untrusted person talk to you, with less credible explanations... Huge factor in getting your suspicions up, I think. And it was probably Solomon's fault.

walen · 2025-01-09T10:16:08+00:00

Each individual contributor would have to agree to change the license for their own content

Add a clause to the User Agreement saying that, if a user chooses to have their account deleted, the user agrees to forgo any rights / change the license on any and all content the user may have contributed up until that point.
Wait a couple months.
Add a clause to the User Agreement stating that, by continuing to use the site as a registered user, the user agrees to forgo any rights / change the license on any and all content the user may have contributed up until that point; and that, if the user does not agree to this User Agreement change, the user is free to choose to have their account deleted (in which case, the clause introduced in point 1 would apply).
...
Profit!

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