I've kept my Pro subscription this whole time. Don't even know why (I think part of me was hoping the models would make a real comeback and I'd have a reason to use it again). But for probably the past six-plus months, ChatGPT has comprised maybe 5–8% of my daily AI use. At one point, it was easily 70–80%. That was when 4.1 was cranking like a motherfucking beast, 4.5 was writing the crispest, sharpest prose of any model out there, and o3 was genuinely impressive (before whatever the fuck happened to it). That whole era was the high-water mark of ChatGPT for me. All those models were firing on all cylinders at the same time. Then, they all got worse. You guys know the rest.
During that window, I went all-in on Claude. Opus 4.5 was great. Opus 4.6 was phenomenal (before the Anthropic fuckery). For drafting emails, writing professional documents, handling the dozens of small writing tasks that eat a workday alive—Claude was unbeatable. But you can't predict what you're going to get on any given day anymore. Sometimes you get the old Claude. Other times it's a version that reads like it was lobotomized between sessions. Same prompt, same use case, wildly different output quality depending on the day. That kind of inconsistency is worse than it just being mediocre—at least with mediocre you can plan around it; with Claude right now, you're rolling dice every time you open a new chat.
But is it just me, or has ChatGPT's writing gotten weird? It's terse. It's jumbled. Sentences that should flow into each other just don't. The output technically answers your prompt but reads like no human would ever actually write it that way. I used to hand ChatGPT a writing task and get back something clean. Now I get these choppy, disjointed blocks that I end up rewriting half of anyway, which defeats the entire point. So what's the deal? Has the writing actually gotten worse, or have I just been away long enough that I'm misremembering what it used to be like? I need a reliable daily driver for writing tasks and I want it to be ChatGPT. I hope this isn't the new normal.