The claims of 4.6 or 4.7 being superior genuinely make me laugh. Adapt your workflow if needed and use the superior model instead of just kneejerk believing they actually enshittified a model with zero evidence except vibes on an undeterministic model output. Jesus.
4.6 was the last model that let you disable adaptive thinking and set max thinking token budget. I liked having that available, and still use it sometimes.
Many of the improvements are the result of agentic loops and an emphasis on autonomy. Some of us don’t like that because the models go rogue and ignore design patterns, architecture, coding guidelines or other things that are important.
My friends and colleagues that like the agentic autonomy don’t care about the code, they feel like if it works it works and if an AI system is the only intelligence able to understand it that is ok.
It was quite clear 4.7 was a dumbed down high efficiency model they put out in a rush to handle the capacity issues they were having at the time. I've experienced myself substantial degradation on basic reasoning tasks, which were fixed in 4.8.
In my case it that I'm tired and more likely to miss issues or mistakes. My idea of good enough is at a much lower level when it's 10pm and I'm about to knock off and go to bed in an hour.