At this point, my own experience has been so diverged with the online chatter that I need to consider that either:

    1. I'm in a A/B with a ruthlessly effective model
    2. I've tuned my memory files in a way the model likes
    3. I've been lucky 
    4. I'm just "better at claude" than most

My ego would like it to be 4, but it's probably a combination of the others. I do sometimes I have sessions where it seems to be particularly bad, and I had an experience last week where claude tried to clean up its memory files because it was hitting some limit, and the result was so bad that I had to recover from a backup to get back to effectiveness, so I suspect memory files have a larger impact than most realise, or perhaps that session hit this supposed regressed A/B test?

It's impossible to say, and that is clearly part of the problem. More visibility of this stuff might not even help us, given it is human nature to ascribe patterns to randomness where they don't exist.