The last few days I've seen more degradations and canceled my Max subscription.

Presumptuous and wrong "memories" from a one-off command which affect all future commands, repeated/nonsensical phrases in messages, novel display bugs which make going back in the conversation impossible (I can't tell where I am), lack of basic forking features (resume a current convo in a second CC instance -> fork = no history for that convo?), poor/unclear reasoning, a new set of unclear folksy phrases (it really wants to "cut code" all of a sudden).

Qwen + Opencode has been a game changer: which runs very well on a 4090 for basic/exploratory/private tasks, and being able to switch to and between frontier models (using openrouter in my case) to avoid vendor lock in feels like basic hygiene.

There's also the homo economicus psychological difference between having a token budget to use up, and a cost per token. I'm more thoughtful about my usage now.