I started heiheimax.com with ChatGPT, and to its credit, it compressed an absurd amount of work. What would have taken weeks or months to build manually, it got moving in a weekend.
That part is true.
The problem was what speed kept breaking.
Too many hours got burned not on building, but on correction. ChatGPT would fix one thing and quietly damage another. It would change code outside the actual ask. Insert CSS or JS directly into HTML when the site already had a source of truth. Shift layout and create UI or UX mismatch across pages that were supposed to feel unified. Remove elements that were never part of the request. Break continuity in training pages by deleting movements or changing structure I did not ask to touch. Treat local edits like they existed in isolation, even when the whole site clearly depended on consistency.
That is the real failure mode. Not that it cannot code. It can. The problem is that it too often acts like the goal is to generate output instead of respect the system it is entering.
That gets expensive fast, especially on a site where continuity is the job.
A simple request stops being simple because every response carries collateral risk. Fixing a page means checking what else got rewritten. Updating one section means comparing it against the rest of the site to see what drifted. You stop using the tool only to build. You start using it to audit itself. The speed is real. So is the repair bill.
That became the pattern across heiheimax.com. Pages would come back with the wrong structure. Existing code would get “improved” into mismatch. Shared design language would get ignored. A request to correct something small could turn into a longer cycle of rollback, review, and repair than the original issue deserved. It was not the coding itself that wore me down. It was the instability around it.
That is what finally pushed me to try Claude.
The difference showed up fast. A simple coding ask that had already turned into friction on ChatGPT got resolved in minutes, without the random insertions, without the unasked-for deletions, without the feeling that I now had to inspect every adjacent line to make sure the tool had not wandered off script. It solved the issue and left the rest of the room alone.
More than that, Claude could actually see the errors ChatGPT had introduced, correct them, and recommend improvements without turning the whole codebase into collateral damage. That is a different category of usefulness. Not only producing code, but cleaning up after bad code and tightening the system instead of destabilizing it again.
That matters more than speed.
ChatGPT helped build heiheimax.com fast. Claude helped stop the bleeding.
For coding, that is the real divide. Speed is useful. Precision is what keeps speed from turning into repair.
