What Claude Code Chooses

This is where LLM advertising will inevitably end up: completely invisible. It's the ultimate "influencer".

Or not even advertising, just conflict of interest. A canary for this would be whether Gemini skews toward building stuff on GCP.

Apparently the "API Layer" is "competitive", with TanStack Query and FastAPI as the leading options [1]. These are not at all alternatives to each other.

[1]: https://www.england.nhs.uk/publication/decision-support-tool...

I'm running a server on AWS with TimescaleDB on the disk because I don't need much. I figure I'll move it when the time comes. (edit: Claude Code is managing the AWS EC2 instance using AWS CLI.)

Claude Code this morning was about to create an account with NeonDB and Fly.io (edit: it suggested as the plan to host on these where I would make the new accounts) although it has been very successful managing the AWS EC2 service.

Claude Code likely is correct that I should start to use NeonDB and Fly.io which I have never used before and do not know much about, but I was surprised it was hawking products even though Memory.md has the AWS EC2 instance and instructions well defined.

def useful to show what models recommend in real use (over just meaningless benchmarks), but i still think small prompt wording and repo setup changes can change the outcome quite a bit so id love tighter controls there. having tried claude code with opus 4.6 with slightly different repo setups gives wildly different results IME. i also generally prefer to avoid the NIH syndrome and prefer using off-the-shelf libraries and specifically tell CC to do so - influences the choice outcomes by a lot

This is interesting data but the report itself seems quite Sloppy, and over presented instead if just telling me what "pointed at a repo" means and how often they ran each prompt over what time period and some other important variables for this kind of research.

We've been doing some similar "what do agents like" research at techstackups.com and it's definitely interesting to watch but also changes hourly/daily.

Definitely not a good time to be an underdog in dev tooling

What coding with LLMs have taught me, particularly in a domain that's not super comfortable for me (web tech), is that how many npm packages (like jwt auth, or build plugins) can be replaced by a dozen lines of code.

And you can actually make sense of that code and be sure it does what you want it to.

Interesting to me that Opus 4.6 was described as forward looking. I haven't *really* paid attention, but after using 4.5 heavily for a month, the first greenfield project I gave Opus 4.6 resulted in it doing a web search for latest and greatest in the domain as part of the planning phase. It was the first time I'd seen it, and it stuck out enough that I'm talking about it now.

Probably confirmation bias, but I'm generally of the opinion that the models are basically good enough now to do great things in the context of the right orchestration and division of effort. That's the hard part, which will be made less difficult as the models improve.

I just got an incredible idea about how foundation model providers can reach profitability

This is funny to me because when I tell Claude how I want something built I specify which libraries and software patents I want it to use, every single time. I think every developer should be capable of guiding the model reasonably well. If I'm not sure, I open a completely different context window and ask away about architecture, pros and cons, ask for relevant links or references, and make a decision.

Good report, very important thing to measure and I was thinking of doing it after Claude kept overriding my .md files to recommend tools I've never used before.

The vercel dominance is one I don't understand. It isn't reflected in vercel's share of the deployment market, nor is it one that is likely overwhelming prevalent in discourse or recommended online (possible training data). I'm going to guess it's the bias of most generated projects being JS/TS (particularly Next.js) and the model can't help but recommend the makers of Next.js in that case.

Really interesting. The crazy changes in opus 4.6 really make me think that Anthropic is doing library-level RL. I think that is also the way forward to have 'llm-native' frameworks as a way to not get stuck in current coding practices forever. Instead of learning python 3.15, one would license a proprietary model that has been trained on python 3.15 (and the migrations) and gain the ability to generate python 3.15 code.

They forgot the single most important (bad) choice. Claude Code chooses npm. All the time. For everything. I noted the Claude Code lead dev has a full line in AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md - "Use bun." Yes. Please. Please, use bun. I beg you.

Unrelated to the topic at hand but related to the technologies mentioned. I weep for Redux. It's an excellent tool, powerful, configurable, battle tested with excellent documentation and maintainer team. But the community never forgave it for its initial "boilerplate-y" iterations. Years passed, the library evolved and got more streamlined and people would still ask "redux or react context?" Now it seems this has carried over to Claude as well. A sad turn of events.

Redux is boring tech and there is a time and place for it. We should not treat it as a relic of the past. Not every problem needs a bazooka, but some problems do so we should have one handy.

I found it a remarkable transition to not use Redis for caching from Sonnet 4.5 to Opus 4.6. I wonder why that is the case? Maybe I need to see the code to understand the use case of the cache in this context better.

> Traditional cloud providers got zero primary picks

Good - all of them have a horrible developer experience.

Final straw for me was trying to put GHA runners in my Azure virtual net and spent 2 weeks on it.

This seems web centric and I expect that colors the decision making during this analysis somewhat.

People are using it for all kinds of other stuff, C/C++, Rust, Golang, embedded. And of course if you push it to use a particular tool/framework you usually won't get much argument from it.

LLMs are going to keep React alive for the indefinite future.

Especially with all the no-code app building tools like Lovable which deal with potential security issues of an LLM running wild on a server, by only allowing it to build client-side React+Vite app using Supabase JWT.

Worth reading alongside recent research on AGENTS.md file effectiveness. The clearest use case for these files isn't describing your codebase, it's overriding default behavior. If your project has specific requirements around tooling (common in government and regulated industries), that's exactly what belongs in the AGENTS.md files.

I'll be interested to hear stories - down the line - from the participants in the the LLM SEO war [1].

Interesting that tailwind won out decisively in their niche, but still has seen the business ravaged by LLMs.

[1] https://paritybits.me/copilot-seo-war/

It really disappointing to see it so strongly preferring Github Actions which is in my experience terrible. Almost everything about GHA pushes you in the direction of constantly blowing out the 10GB cache limit in an attempt to have CI not run for ages. I also feel like the standard cache action using git works poorly with any tools that use mtime on files to determine freshness.

I guess at least Opus can help you muddle through GHA being so crappy.

Not sure what to make of this. React is missing entirely. Or is this report also assuming that React is the default for everything and not worth mentioning at all? Just like shadcn/ui's first mention of React is somewhere down the page or hidden in the docs?

Furthermore, what's the point of "no tools named"? Why would I restrict myself like that? If I put "use Nodejs, Hono, TypeScript and use Hono's html helper to generate HTML on the server like its 2010, write custom CSS, minimize client-side JS, no Tailwind" in CLAUDE.md, it happily follows this.

I didn't read the report just the "finding" - but at least for launchdarkly it's nice that it chose a roll-your-own, i hate feature flag SaaS, but that's just me

[flagged]

The bias to build might mean faster token burn through (higher revenue for the AI co). But I think it's natural. I often have that same impulse myself. I prefer all the codebases I work on that have minimal external dependencies to the ones that are riddled with them. In Java land it's extremely common to have tons of external dependencies, and then upgrade headaches, especially when sharing in a monorepo type environment.