Very much this... The utility of Claude has grown exponentially with the amount of work I've put into memory/context management, tooling, skills development and CLAUDE.md (and friends). I freely admit I may just be fortunate, but I've yet to hit a bug in a new release that rose above the level of minor annoyance.

The thing that really validated this point was when I recently tried Codex again. Out of the box it was OK, but not great. I swung over the memory apparatus and had it import directives from my existing Claude install and it was almost immediately quite useful in its own right and, especially, as a counterpoint to Claude when dealing with some fairly complex operational issues.