Off topic, but I really like the writing style on your blog. Do you have any advice for improving my own? In an older comment[1], you mentioned the craft of sharpening an idea to a very fine, meaningful, well-written point. Are there any books, or resources you’d recommend for honing that craft? Thanks in advance.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44082994

I agree with what you what you have written, which is why I would never pay a subscription to an external AI provider.

I prefer to run inference on my own HW, with a harness that I control, so I can choose myself what compromise between speed and the quality of the results is appropriate for my needs.

When I have complete control, resulting in predictable performance, I can work more efficiently, even with slower HW and with somewhat inferior models, than when I am at the mercy of an external provider.

My bad — I had Max, so more than $20. I can’t edit the comment any more. Can’t keep track of the names. I wonder when ‘pro’ started to mean ‘lowest tier’.

But your article is interesting. You think some of the degradation is because when I think I’m using Opus they’re giving me Sonnet invisibily?

I used the $60/mo subscription and I bet most developers get access to AI agents via their company, and there was no difference. They should have reduced the rate limits, or offered a new model, anything except silently reduce the quality of their flagship product to reduce cost.

The cost of switching is too low for them to be able to get away with the standard enshittification playbook. It takes all of 5 minutes to get a Codex subscription and it works almost exactly the same, down to using the same commands for most actions.

So instead of breaking shit they should have just increased their prices.

Corporate software in general is often chosen based on the value returned simply being "good enough" most of the time, because the actual product being purchased is good controls for security, compliance, etc.

A corporate purchaser is buying hundreds to thousands of Claude seats and doesn't care very much about percieved fluctuations in the model performance from release to release, they're invested in ties into their SSO and SIEM and every other internal system and have trained their employees and there's substantial cost to switching even in a rapidly moving industry.

Consumer end-users are much less loyal, by comparison.

2 weeks ago the rolling session usage plummeted to borderline unusable. I'd say I get a weekly output equivalent to 2 session windows before change.

Even just in chats with Opus 4.6 I noticed hitting limits so much faster.

Don't confuse the many voices of a crowd with a single person's fickle view. If you can track an individual person or organization who changes their mind 'every other week' then more power to you, but unless you're performing that longitudinal study you are simply seeing differential levels of enthusiasm.

> Stop using these dopamine brain poisoning machines, think for yourself, don't pay a billionaire for their thinking machine.

Yeah, and also stop using these things they call "computers", think for yourself, write your texts by hand, send letters to people. /s