Guess what? Claude Opus 4.5 is here, and people are saying it is the world's best coding agent. But I needed some proof, so I put Opus 4.5 head-to-head with Gemini 3 Pro.
I built a SaaS app and I wanted to see who would win, and the results might shock you. I did it with my friend, The Boring Marketer, and in this article, we are going to show you how Opus 4.5 stacks against Gemini 3 Pro, and also how you can get the most out of Opus 4.5. Hint: it has to do with setting up Claude skills, and we show you exactly how to do it.
I’m just going to open the curtains and show everyone sort of how I'm using the latest models. I want to dig into Claude Opus 4.5, I want to jam a little bit on Gemini 3.0 Pro, and I want to show people how I'm building landing pages and websites as a non-designer, non-engineer that are driving great conversion.
Let's do a test. Let's use Opus 4.5 with a front-end design skill, let's see what we can come up with, and then let's do Gemini 3 Pro with the same prompt and let's see what we can come up with there as well.
Market Context: The AI Developer Tooling Boom
I believe that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. By 2025, the market for AI-powered developer tools is projected to exceed $1.5 billion, driven primarily by advanced LLMs like Opus and Gemini enhancing full-stack development speed.
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Setting the Stage: The Estate Clear SaaS Challenge
Estate Clear creates a realtime family dashboard where executives can post updates upload documents and track progress while family members get instant notifications instead of playing phone tag.
Here's a way we could do this: you want to get an idea from Idea Browser and run that and see what it comes up with? I actually really like this idea: Estate Dashboard for keeping families informed during probate. Estate executives face constant phone calls and texts from anxious relatives saying, "What's happening with dad's estate?"
I mean, it's one of those small ideas. I've gone through that process before, and you know it, it's a black box and it takes over a year. You have no idea what's going on. You're getting these replies from lawyers and stuff like that. Give me the Door Dash visual that's like just letting me see what's going on, you know? You'd probably save a lot of money on billable hours to attorneys going back and forth asking them questions and stuff, and the retention is probably insane. You're not going to cancel that.
We chose this concept because it represents a real-world, vertical SaaS problem that requires both solid backend logic and a clean, trustworthy user interface—a perfect test for advanced LLM design capabilities.
Head-to-Head Design Test: Opus 4.5 vs. Gemini 3 Pro
I want to create a conversion optimized landing page for my new startup build ahtml that I can view locally you must use the front end design skill to generate the page.
Typically what I would do here is I would put this whole description and actually let me go ahead and paste this here just so people can can see it. Typically what I would do is I would do some foundational research, you know, like I would put this into there: hey, use the Perplexity MCP, tell me who is in this space, what's a unique kind of differentiating angle that we can take, blah blah blah. But, you know, we really just kind of want to see, hey, what do these models do with minimal direction if we just give it the concept.
I'm going to go over to AI Studio and I'm going to give the exact same prompt. I'm going to remove the piece about the actual like front-end design skill because we know that Gemini already has those skills. What do you think's going to happen? Who do you think's going to win?
I think that if I were to create a prediction here, I think that Gemini is going to come up with something more outside of the box. I think Claude is going to create something a little more of like what you'd expect. I think both will be good, but that's just my gut vibe. I wouldn't be surprised if Gemini put in AI features in the MVP. I've noticed it's been doing that. I think that's interesting. My guess is Opus is going to come up and do like a very solid, fully featured SaaS app, but it's going to be like more kind of similar to what you're saying. It's going to be similar to what you'd expect, but I think it's going to be really, really solid, whereas the Gemini might have like a couple bugs and it's, you know, explored edges that we probably didn't even think of.
Claude Opus 4.5: The Refined Aesthetic
I like the overall like aesthetic of this. I mean, going through probate and doing all that and dealing with this in the family like isn't exciting, right? So like it's got like a nice sort of like subtle tone to it. It's not like screaming in my face with a bunch of like wild colors and stuff like that. Clearly it is not just using the same kind of like purples and typical AI stuff.
[IMAGE_PROMPT: Screenshot of the clean, subtle, conversion-optimized landing page generated by Claude Opus 4.5 for Estate Clear.]
This is really awesome. This is definitely like all you need for like an MVP or getting something like this live. Anecdotally, it does feel like we've with Opus 4.5 and Gemini 3, it does feel like we've entered a new stratosphere of vibe coding. I would definitely agree. I think that the lines are just blurring across the board. The line between a non-technical person being able to code blurred, and I would always feel very frustrated with like the design portion of this whole process. Now that line is getting blurred, so all these lines are just blurring, and it's just like vibe building in a way, and the entire stack is just kind of coming together into one place, which is nuts.
Gemini 3 Pro: AI Features and Human Imagery
Keep the family united goes hard. Manage the estate, keep the family united. Stop playing phone tag. The private dashboard for executives to share updates, documents, and milestones with the whole family at once. Very clear, clear, but I don't know, it doesn't have a... I like some of the animations on 4.5. I also like the layout of the 4.5 one. I can get the copy and I can get that initial visual like right away without needing to scroll or scan down the page.
[IMAGE_PROMPT: Screenshot of the vibrant, feature-heavy landing page generated by Gemini 3 Pro for Estate Clear, highlighting the AI update feature.]
This is very similar between both models. It is the AI. Don't know what to say? Let AI write the update. You called that for sure. I think having some of these AI first ideas really help. I was curious. This is cool. It already built a little kind of like preview of some functionality here into the landing page, so I like that idea a lot. I like the imagery here. It feels more human, I guess, which is also something that, you know, coding models have missed in the past. Everything feels very robotic. You've got the emojis, you've got the same style of like illustrations and stuff like that.
Man, it's tough. I think both are good. I think from a pure aesthetic standpoint, I think I like the Claude version better. I think objectively it was nicer. I think from the feature perspective, like I said, the AI feature is really interesting. Impressed that it worked, too. My real question with 4.5 is like, okay, great, now it's made a landing page, but can it create a SaaS app? Ultimately, I'm interested in pushing 4.5 to the limits, and I would be curious if it actually could build an app that I can sell.
Initial Design Comparison: Claude Opus 4.5 vs. Gemini 3 Pro
| Feature | Claude Opus 4.5 (Winner) | Gemini 3 Pro |
|---|---|---|
| Aesthetic & Tone | Refined, subtle, professional tone appropriate for the probate vertical. | Vibrant, slightly more generic "startup" feel. |
| Layout & UX | Better information hierarchy; key visual elements are top-of-fold. | Clear, but requires more scrolling to grasp the core value proposition. |
| Feature Innovation | Solid, expected feature set for an MVP. | Included unexpected, interesting AI features (e.g., AI-written updates). |
| Vibe Coding Quality | High-quality, production-ready design that avoids typical AI artifacts. | Good, but slightly more robotic imagery and style. |
Beyond the Landing Page: Building the Clickable Prototype
If we wanted to build this entire product in Claude code with 4.5 you you could definitely do that.
I mean, you know, if you wanted to build this entire product in Claude code with 4.5, you could certainly do that with either of these models. Now, what I have personally found—and to be clear, I haven't tried to build a full-on application with Gemini 3 yet—but I think that Claude's earlier models, I would always go back to them. While the logic is good and the thinking and the debugging is good, getting from zero to fully ready was easier with the Claude models. That's just been my experience. So I always kind of try to lean on Claude as the workhorse and then have these other models doing what they're good at as sort of an advisory model, if you will.
Let's see how each of these builds out beyond the landing page and just say, "Hey, create a clickable prototype for the concept," and we can kind of get a gauge on how it's thinking there. I want to build the full clickable prototype of the app locally so that I can open up a HTML and see how it looks and feels.
If we wanted to build the back end, we could absolutely. We could set up the entire backend. Some of the things that I've used in like my most recent builds are like Neon, which is kind of the database, plugs in nicely and plays well with Vercel, Clerk for OAUTH and login, easy to spin up OAUTH or anything like that. I would probably deploy onto Vercel or Railway or something along those lines. You could integrate Stripe for the payments and the subscriptions relatively easily as well, and you could build the entire logic and application here for sure.
Claude's Prototype: Deep Functionality and Vibe Coding
This is the family view. First impressions here, it maintained the aesthetic perfectly, like down to the font. It's not your typical build a SaaS dashboard AI look at all. This looks really good. Here's kind of your progress sort of thing that we talked about. We've got recent activity, the different family members here as well. It went ahead and built out a lot of these subviews in this prototype. We've got the updates keeping you informed with the latest estate news. This is a really nice touch. We've got document storage, which is cool, milestones.
My take is I feel that Opus went a little bit deeper in terms of thinking through the the product. I mean, this looks good, it's clean, it's not bad, but I think I like the other version a little bit better.
The Google Ecosystem Advantage: Anti-Gravity IDE
One of the things that I really like about Gemini and just Google generally is how vertically integrated it is. Now developers and stuff have their preferences for what tools and what things they want to use like at different levels of their stack, but if you think about like 90% of people—someone who's just trying to build their app or get something out there or whatever—having everything like integrated into AI Studio from OAUTH to your storage or database to easily integrating AI models into your product to hosting, etc. Google has the full range of capabilities there that they own that you know they can integrate directly into like AI Studio, which I think from just a convenience perspective for most people is a really powerful value proposition.
I'm curious if we put the same prompt into the Gemini 3 Pro model in Anti-Gravity IDE if it is different than what you get in AI Studio. My hunch is that you're going to get worse design out of Anti-Gravity, but let's check it out. Why should people use Anti-Gravity over Cursor? Well, it's a good question. At the end of the day, they're both VS Code forks, so they're both kind of based off of VS Code, which is open source and free.
I like some of the things Anti-Gravity is working on. They've got some like Chrome stuff built in here where it can access the browser in a really easy way and it can even access—you install a Chrome extension. If anyone's done vibe coding in the past and you're trying to like squash a bug, that whole debugging process is pretty painful. With the Chrome extension that Anti-Gravity connects to, it can access that data for you programmatically. It's accessing the DOM, it's seeing sort of the data behind the scenes. I suspect it will greatly minimize the back and forth in this debugging process when it has a very tight browser integration.
We put in the same prompt here as well. Right now, actually, I think it is generating a mockup with Nano Banana Pro. So it's actually generating an image with Nano Banana instead of going ahead and building the page from scratch. Here's what it's doing: it's generating a custom dashboard mockup image first to make the page look real, then I'll build the HTML file. It used Nano Banana, so it's integrated to create a high-fidelity visual mockup that we can see. Really nice initial mockup, I would say. Totally. Really nice. Those chunky buttons. Also, that's kind of like how a real team would work, right? Like, okay, let's create like a high-fidelity mockup, let's make sure you like it before we go and write all the code. Anti-Gravity may surprise us here.
I think your instinct that AI Studio will have a better initial design output from one prompt was correct. I think what was cool about Anti-Gravity and this whole sprint that we did with it is if you scroll down the mockup, how that mockup is and how this is wireframed out, there is some alpha in there. And then, you know, maybe you go back to Opus 4.5 or maybe you go back to Gemini 3 Pro on AI Studio and then iterate there.
Advanced Workflow: Leveraging Claude Skills for Conversion
A skill is just like a set of instructions that the model is going to reference when it does a certain task.
There are a few skills that I recommend everyone create with Anthropic Claude Opus. I do a lot of website optimization for thevibemarketer.com. I want to figure out, hey, how can I convert more visitors into customers? It comes down to really good copywriting. I think that that's a struggle for like 90% of business owners is knowing what kind of copy to write for their business. You don't want to feel too cheesy, too salesy, but you also want to leverage the principles of influence and persuasion in the right way.
Defining the Elevated Direct Response Skill
I call this elevated direct response and I build a skill around it and every time I write copy for my website Claude references this skill and it does a great job at you know producing this style of conversion focused copy.
The way that I did it is I found some people in my space or in our space that I like, that I look up to, that have built some pretty huge businesses with community and education and things like that. I say, "Hey, use the Perplexity MCP, go research Cody Sanchez and Alex Hormozi and like the biggest sort of like education or information-based businesses out there and break down exactly how they're writing their copy, how they're positioning their products and services, and how they're talking about what they do. What are the main takeaways that you can learn?"
I collected that into kind of this elevated direct response skill or playbook, and then what I did is I fed Claude Code a bunch of examples of my own writing—things that I've created, a bunch of tweets, even like transcripts of YouTube videos that I've done, you name it—and I said, "Hey, distill this into a brand voice skill." So it broke down the way that I talk, the way that I write, so that it feels natural.
I rebuilt like my entire website using this, and it's been working pretty well. So definitely leverage skills, and with the tool use and the context ability of 4.5, it's going to do a really good job with those.
Installing the Must-Have Front-End Design Skill
Most people don't know that this skill exists. I didn't know it existed until Claude posted like a blog post about it on X and I read it, and you can install it with two simple prompts.
Basically, all you do: you enter this first one in, this adds sort of this Anthropic plug-in marketplace into your Claude Code environment, and then you've got:
plugin install front-end design at Cloud Code pluginsWhat this is going to help Claude Code do is avoid all of that typical AI design stuff. We've seen it everywhere. Everything looks the same. You've got the same gradients, the same text, all of that. Skills are just like long sets of prompts or instructions. In there, Claude's own team built this out. It's like, "Avoid the typical AI stuff, build pro production grade designs and interfaces, etc."
This one shot with a one-sentence prompt is far better than what most people are doing out there. The copy hits, the visuals don't look vibe coded at all, it's easy to scan. I can imagine on mobile that this would probably convert pretty well. I don't have too many notes on it.
Final Verdict: Opus 4.5 vs. Gemini 3 Pro
4.5 Opus I think is going to be an incredible model just based off some of these initial tests that we did and that I was doing last night when you combine it with that front-end design skill it's able to oneshot some pretty incredible interfaces and and designs.
I think if you level up that design, like we were talking about, with actual good copy that's geared toward conversion, like you're going to be unstoppable. Just to review: review leaders in your niche, review direct response, add context of how you talk naturally, define your elevated direct response skill. So if you use that in combination with the design skill, I think you'll be really pleased.
The things that I liked here about AI Studio and Anti-Gravity: Anti-Gravity is really cool, it's using Nano Banana Pro. I think Nano Banana has been awesome to play around with. AI Studio is absolutely cooking right now with the releases and the updates, so it's a playground out there right now.
Pro Tip: Content is the UX
The big piece that people miss with vibe coding is they vibe code stuff but then the copy sucks. You're converting at 1% or less than 1% and you come to the conclusion that 'vibe coding doesn't work for me.' In a lot of ways, the content is the UX. If you can create great copy, you're going to probably be able to convert even if the design isn't drop-dead gorgeous. Focus on defining your brand voice skill first, then apply the design skill.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Is Claude Opus 4.5 better than Gemini 3 Pro for front-end design?
Based on initial tests building a SaaS landing page and prototype, Claude Opus 4.5, especially when combined with the specialized Front-End Design Skill, produced a more refined, aesthetically pleasing, and production-ready design that avoided typical AI artifacts. Gemini 3 Pro was highly innovative, integrating AI features, but its aesthetic was slightly less polished.
What is the Claude Front-End Design Skill and how do I install it?
The Front-End Design Skill is a set of pre-written instructions provided by Anthropic that guides Claude Code to generate professional, conversion-optimized interfaces and designs, explicitly avoiding generic "AI looks." You install it within your Claude Code environment using two simple prompts to access the Anthropic plugin marketplace.
How can I create conversion-optimized landing page copy using AI?
The recommended method is creating an "Elevated Direct Response Skill" within Claude. This involves researching successful leaders in your niche (like Alex Hormozi), defining their core conversion frameworks, distilling your natural brand voice from your existing content, and combining these elements into a single, powerful instruction set that Claude references every time it writes copy.
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