My Dealer Is Cutting the Product

I’m a junior dev. Or I was. Now I’m mostly a professional copy-paster. I stitch together code snippets the way my grandmother used to make quilts, except my quilts have a nasty habit of catching fire.

Six months ago, the stuff was pure. You’d type a prompt, a beautiful, clean function would appear, and boom—you were a god. A few tokens for a miracle. We were all hooked instantly. It was the best deal on the street. I was shipping features I barely understood. My boss thought I was a genius. I thought I was a genius.

Now? The magic is gone. The dealer got greedy.

The same prompt that used to deliver a perfect hit now gives me a rambling, buggy mess that looks suspiciously like it was scraped from a five-year-old forum post. It takes four or five tries to get something that even remotely compiles. It feels… diluted. Weaker. But the price on the street? It keeps going up.

Is it just me? Am I chasing a high I’ll never get again? Or is this the plan? Get us all hooked on the pure stuff, then start cutting it with sawdust and charge us more for the privilege. Sometimes I think the model is just generating AI slop to keep the token meter running, padding its answers like a chatbot trying to meet a word count for a school essay.

I’m paying more to argue with an API that feels dumber every week. Features that were free are now behind a "pro" tier paywall. The free dose is getting smaller. I’m spending more time debugging the AI’s garbage than I ever spent writing my own.

So what’s the play here? Incompetence or a business model? Are they nerfing the models to save cash, or is this just stage two of the hustle? The first hit was free, now we pay for the withdrawal.

My little detox trick: for the first hour of your workday, unplug your router. Seriously. See what your brain does when it knows the dealer isn’t home. It’s a useful panic to get reacquainted with. The folks at Attention Activists call it finding focus; I call it learning to cook your own meal again, even if it’s just toast.

I don’t know. Maybe I’m just a junkie complaining that the product isn’t what it used to be. Tell me I’m wrong.