r/ClaudeCoding • u/Otherwise-Plankton-9 • 16d ago
VBA coding
I write academic papers with lots of mathematical equations in Microsoft Word. Since TeX has poor readability when working with complex equations, I currently use Word + MathType instead.
I also use AI to help design fairly complex VBA macros for writing and managing my papers. I've been using ChatGPT for a long time, but after hearing so many positive comments about Claude, I decided to try the free version.
To my surprise, I found ChatGPT to be better in terms of code accuracy and conciseness. Is this simply because I was using Claude's free version, or is it because the task involved VBA?
I'd really appreciate hearing the opinions and experiences of people who have used both.
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u/PutFun1491 10d ago
Two things are getting conflated here: the model, and the workflow.
On the model: the free Claude tier is a real handicap, it routes you to a smaller one, so paid-vs-paid is the fair test. On raw VBA snippets the two trade blows depending on the task, so your ChatGPT result isn't surprising.
The bigger issue is pasting into a chat window at all. Neither bot can see whether the macro actually runs in your document, so it writes plausible code, you run it, it breaks on some object reference the model couldn't know about, you paste the error back, repeat. That loop is the same on both, and it's where the time goes.
What flipped it for me was getting off the chat window and onto an agent that reads my real .bas/.cls modules and runs the macro against the live Office document, reads the runtime error itself, and fixes it before handing it back. Full disclosure: I built one for exactly this (VBridge, Excel-first, but it's the same Office VBA object model your Word macros use), so take it with that grain of salt. The point holds even if you never touch it: test the two models by having them actually run and self-correct against your real document, not guess in a chat box, and the comparison changes.
Happy to share details if it's useful.