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by resonious 24 days ago
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.

4 comments

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.

If pricing is per-token then in theory the vendor can offer you modes that optimize token usage or quality whereas all-you-can eat encourages vendors to satisfy you just enough to keep paying but the trend is towards lower quality responses.
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.

Fireworks?
Provides access to AI models for a per-token fee. See OpenRouter, they are one of many.
i believe they are referring to https://fireworks.ai/models/fireworks/glm-5p2
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.

If you bother to look at the issue instead of whining and complaining, you will see the evidence.
When I disagree with the data: I will nitpick every last detail of methodology, any cross-corroboration is an anecdote, suddenly I demand a-priori levels of justification. All science is flawed anyways, it's not like mathematics, you can't get absolute certainty, so why bother? You're always going to be making base assumptions that can be challenged, you're necessarily going to abstract out the territory, the map is flawed.

When I agree with the data: I will boast about the victories of science and empiricism, we found the perfect set of natural abstractions that are necessary and sufficient to map out the territory that carve at the joints of the problem, any concern about assumptions is rebutted with generic "Well, we're just pragmatists; we're not perfect, but clearly we're converging on the right direction! You're clearly someone who just wants to nitpick and not get any work done."

My experience with certain hackernews commenters in a nutshell.

This is evidence of a bug, not the purposeful enshittification people are referencing
This reminds me of a time in COVID-health response when certain scientists said their evidence was real evidence and yours was not.

"There's no evidence to prove xyz" then they would say, as your evidence was never as rigorous as theirs. And since they were proclaimed to be the only authorized scientists in the room, by authority of big governing bodies, they were right.

So people will see whatever evidence they want, and whine and complain to dig into their side as tribalistic creatures.

Look, I felt it. I didn't wait for the official apology from Anthropic. I quite before they published that, then felt very vindicated when they did.