I saw some small business owner complain about this behavior on twitter some time ago and he mentioned he only saw non-Americans do this and it made him really mad or something and he didn't provide the service and banned them or something. Funnily enough I do think this happens so sometimes I cancel instantly and sometimes deliberately wait until there are a few days left on the subscription exactly out of paranoia behavior that you'll get a worse service or something, that they must have some database field early cancel and mess with you or something.
Not to dismiss the AI but the important part is that you still need someone able to recognize these solutions in the first place. A lot of things were just hidden in plain sight before AI but no one noticed or didn't have the framework either in maths or any other field they're specialized in to recognize those feats.
December 2025 was the breakthrough for me.
January Claude was euphoric, ChatGPT was up there. February Gemini cooked for a second there. March amazing. April the big bad nerf. May GPT 5.5 is just pure bliss altough 2x limits temporarily, not sure about Claude it's sort of okay still not as good as it felt before, slowly increasing limits with more compute and rebuilding good will.
I think Opus 4.6 at its peak was the "how can anyone not get that this is good" for me.
Then the nerf, and the massive uplift in tokens for 4.7, a model which I find lazy and prone to hallucinate.
It's probably time to try GPT5.5. Like many I'm pretty heavily invested in the anthropic ecosystem at this point, which I suppose gives another strong reason to make the switch.
The openclaw ban pushed me over to 5.5 for some daily usage. I feel like Opus and 5.5 are good at very different things. 5.5 can be too literal, and it does not have as much of a ‘creative’ bent whether that’s toward design, UI/UX, interpreting vague instructions, etc. So, in that way, Opus had sort of spoiled me.
On the other hand, this year I’ve been in the habit of using codex as a bug finder / audit layer, where it shines, and I can tell you, Opus makes a lot of mistakes, and as we all know struggles with laziness — and has gotten good at encoding that laziness into the codebase (// Per instructions, pass this test by default) where it can live for a long time. So, Opus had spoiled me, but more with its ability to sketch holistically than its ability to put out perfect codebases.
Upshot - it was good to switch horses for a while, as you mention. Slightly different skill sets there. And I still reach for claude especially for initial design. But right now the daily driver is 5.5 / xhigh fast mode, and it’s very capable.
I only used Claude first time in April, previously only ChatGPT and Gemini. And I struggle to see what the hype is all about - yes it seems a tiny bit smarter than the pack, but on the 20$ subscription it runs out of tokens in 5-20 minutes, and then you need to wait 3-4h.
ChatGPT 5.5 seems capable, although a bit stingy with “thinking” compared to earlier models, and I never run into session limits.
I was a dedicated Claude user but in March/April I started using GPT5.5 on a new project that Claude had tried and failed to execute successfully. GPT knocked it out of the park, and was able to do it within my subscription allocation of tokens. I'd recommend giving it a go at least. Something like OpenClaude can let you use the Claude tools you're used to
The real danger is AI slop displacing actual good resources for software engineering. Once those are gone they will have to be reverse engineered from the AI it's weights.
I'm thoroughly enjoying using AI to write code, but it paid off by years of doing things the hard way before. I already was a so called "10x developer" if I speak for myself. I'm doing things even faster now with AI.
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