Tested Claude vs ChatGPT for coding a web scraper and one was way faster

I spent last Saturday trying both on the same task. Claude gave me a working scraper in 10 minutes. ChatGPT took 25 and I had to debug a bunch of stuff. Has anyone else noticed a big gap between them for Python work?

2 comments

2 Comments

skyler_craig14d agoMost Upvoted

Did you clear the chat between tests though?

parkerrodriguez14d ago

Wait, did you actually time both from a cold start... or did you already have the environment set up for one of them? That honestly makes a huge difference because Claude tends to lean on libraries you already have installed while ChatGPT will try to import stuff that might not even be there. I ran the same scraper test a few weeks ago and ChatGPT actually finished first once I told it to use requests and BeautifulSoup instead of Selenium. Claude gave me a cleaner first draft though, no argument there. Just saying the gap might not be as wide if you control for dependencies and stuff.