Totally possible that I'm just hallucinating/projecting/etc or my workflows somehow changes in terms of difficulty, but it's been kind of shocking.
Now it's like talking to my hungover self, after 3 days bender, who just wanted to be left alone.
That's exactly why they did it. Nerf Opus 5.5, then drop Fable 5.5 just before IPO so it looks better next to its weaker predecessor.
And people wonder why open models are a big deal, and why some people love them so much, despite being 30% worse than the frontier.
Having control over something that writes most of your code is important.
Only local AI capable hardware and frontier open weight models can provide that.
So I'm AI pilled and in another career, and started to think, what if the problem is the inputs? They release Opus X.X and at first it's a rush of their best users, best use cases, upgraded lanes. As weeks go on, adoption increases, cruft uses start to poison the model? Is this how the ongoing evolution works? I'd love to get Sonnet 5.5 and Opus for review in a place where I could reliably daily drive for X months / Y years etc.
Surely everyone is that kind of person.
Who wants to pay for a service that doesn't work properly half the time?
"More reasoning" != "better"
Tonight has been maddening with the kinds of absurd mistakes it's repeatedly making. It's so frustrating.
I'm the kind of person that wants something to be consistent and reliable. And Anthropic has been great, except for in this way. Which is enough of a recurring frustration (about every couple months this year) that I genuinely can't wait for other options to catch up. Then I'll be leaving as soon as I can.
I just don't know how long that will be.