Deja Vu... This looks just like the Claude Code performance regression back in April. I just quit my Claude subscription when that happened and went to Codex.

Now I'm kinda thinking of trying per token for both, using GLM 5.2 on Fireworks for most tasks, shelling out to the big boys only when needed. Not totally confident I'll break even though.

Re per token, I had the same reaction, but given both labs are economically advantaged moving customers to per-token consumption... almost want to avoid this on principle. Even if not intentional, benefitting from a degraded product is not something I want to accept or enable.

More now than ever (since original ChatGPT release), the OSS models and open harnesses (eg Pi) are looking mighty attractive.

Right? I also quit Claude Code and switch to Codex over that. Now I’m trying to figure out how I could make an extra $65,000 to never have to be concerned about this nonsense again. I know the economics of using open router etc…

But I’m reminded of ~2008 and the rise of “the cloud” as a marketing term that seemed to me to be a cover for dropping an expectation of rich clients, increasing a companies margins around subscriptions that would chip away at local ownership.

Then I got offput by the zealotry and absolutism around “true FoSS”, told myself I was young and moved on.

And really, a lot of subscription models I kind of can appreciate/ tolerate. Might be irksome but whatever, I get that software is expensive to make and it’s not fair in 2026 to value a yearly upgrade of Photoshop at $200. The capricious UI changes to things that’ve worked for 20 years and they take away say the classic color swatches altogether - silly and dumb.

I can use another professionally necessary tool I pay $200/ mo for, Codex, to whip up a classic swatch plugin.

Is that $200 a fair price for my token usage? I think an extremely heavy month I might’ve used a billion tokens?

But that right there is the problem. They have no idea what, specifically, profitability looks like and are going to be pulling endless levers for … I genuinely have no idea how long - at least through 2030/2032 if we tea leaves their debt obligations?

I don’t want to think about any of that. At all. I don’t want to spend time evaluating model preference and degradation and updating the nuances of how I “speak” to an AI because there’s some mystery backend experiment running on the output I use to produce functional outputs — ie the actual products I get paid to build/ maintain.

AI’s something between a tool and coworking companion, and the capricious “personality” changes due to playing with poorly understood and knobs and levers at the inference level - is maddening. To that end, I want a box in the corner I can point to and know exactly the quality of outputs that no one but myself modifies.

The vibe-assumed claude code performance regression, yep. People should stop expecting consistent performance from non-deterministic systems. There is zero empirical corroboration of performance degredation.

There has been a step change... in the amount of whining and complaining coders exhibit lately.

Fireworks?