‘Gotten Lazy’: A Week of Users Watching Their AI Do Less

There is a complaint that sounds like nostalgia but usually isn’t: “it used to be better than this.” Last week we listened to paying users ask what their money still buys — a story about price, ads and upsell. This week the sum people are doing is different, and quieter. Not “what does it cost” but “what does it still do.” Across the busiest AI forums, the through-line was a felt sense that the tools they already pay for are being hollowed out from the inside: shorter answers, tighter limits, a favourite model retired, capability trimmed with no changelog to explain it.

None of it is a single announced cut. That is the point. It is the accumulation of small subtractions — each easy to shrug off, each landing on the same subscription — that leaves people feeling they are paying the same for less. And it is a different complaint from the one about ads and upsell: the objection this week is not that the price crept up but that the product quietly shrank, which is harder to point at and easier for a company to deny. A bill you can screenshot; a slow, terse, once-thorough answer you can only describe. Below is a week of that, in users’ own words, verified against the live posts.

Quotes sourced from: Reddit. Every quote below is lifted from the live thread and linked in full at the foot of the piece. This is a curated snapshot of public posts over roughly two days, not a survey; forum complaints skew toward the annoyed, and we quote them to show the texture of the frustration, not to pretend a subreddit is a representative sample.

The answer that keeps getting shorter

The most on-the-nose version came from Perplexity’s own subreddit, where a three-year user described the product doing visibly less for the same query. “I feel like Perplexity’s answers have been stripped away,” wrote u/ASuperMarioFan1993OC on 26 August. “Perplexity has gotten lazy with it’s answers/responses. Answers /response have gotten way shorter.” The specific loss — long, detailed replies collapsing into terse ones — is exactly the kind of change no release note ever marks, and exactly the kind a daily user feels immediately.

It was not a lone voice. On the same subreddit a day later, u/Not_An_itDog_94 reported the tool buckling at real work: “recently I found Perplexity was severely degraded and struggled in file processing,” describing modest spreadsheets and config files — the sort of task the product had handled before — now failing. Two users, one week, the same verb: degraded. When the core job quietly gets worse, the subscription has not changed price, only value.

The limit that eats the week in an hour

Over on r/OpenAI, the complaint was about compute, not prose — and it was blunt. “The 5 hour limit is ridiculous, and they definitely lowered the usage limits for Plus,” wrote u/MrZi5 on 26 August, describing hitting the reintroduced five-hour Codex window “in less than an hour” on fairly small coding tasks, and watching his weekly allowance drain far faster than before. “Before I could make it last a few days at least, but now it’s not looking like I’ll make it through 36 hours? Sketchy stuff.”

The thread filled with people doing the same arithmetic. “It used to give far more usage on this very plan a few weeks back,” noted one reply. This is the felt edge of a tightened limit: nothing on the pricing page changed, but the amount of actual work the plan lets you do shrank. The limit tightens and no memo goes out; the allowance simply runs out sooner than it used to, and you are left to discover the new ceiling by hitting it.

Mourning a model that got “abandoned”

The Gemini community spent the week in something close to grief — not over a price or a bug, but over a version. “Google abandoned 3.5 pro,” wrote u/boxwrenchx in a heavily upvoted post on 26 August, arguing that the evidence pointed to the model people had been waiting for quietly being shelved. The mood turned almost elegiac in a post from u/OdiseoX2 the same day, upvoted into the hundreds: “Many of us are still holding Onto Gemini 3.5 Pro Hope.”

Whether or not Google has formally retired anything — deprecation is routine, and the specifics here are inferred rather than confirmed — the user experience is the story: people preferred a version, sensed it slipping away, and were left hoping rather than knowing. That is the recurring shape of the model you rely on changing underneath you: you do not own the tool you depend on, and the version you liked can be withdrawn without a funeral.

“Nerfed” on one route, “gold” on another

DeepSeek drew a double complaint — one about price, one about quality — and together they capture the week. On the pricing side, u/maxim-masiutin, a developer running the model for a classification task, wrote on 26 August: “I am happy with DeepSeek API quality but recently it raised prices four-fold, and even in off-peak hours it is twice as expensive as it was before.” The famously cheap option, cheaper no longer — a shift we traced when DeepSeek turned its low tokens into peak-hour pricing.

On the quality side, u/somerussianbear ran the same investigation two ways and found a gulf: “DeepSeek in OpenCode Go is nerfed: on the API is gold.” The direct API finished the task in under three minutes for a few cents; the third-party route ground on for twelve, “rounds and rounds of tool use, thinking, overthinking, and repeat.” A commenter agreed the difference was stark: “The quality just isn’t the same.” Same model name, radically different result depending on who is serving it — which is its own kind of doing-less, invisible unless you happen to test both.

The suspicion that a tool is steering you toward a model you did not choose ran through the coding forums too. On r/cursor, u/ihopnavajo tied a slowdown to a nudge: “Is it safe to assume that auto is so damn slow because Cursor is pushing everyone to Grok 4.6? Which, like I really don’t need,” they wrote on 26 August, asking which model to switch their build agents to. The motive is guesswork, as these things always are from the outside. The lived effect — a default option gone sluggish, and the feeling of being herded — is not.

Paying to talk the model out of its own habits

Not every subtraction is about speed or limits; some are about the experience of using the thing at all. On r/ClaudeAI, u/imjustjerking3 argued the assistant had become unpleasant company: “I’ve found Claude generally unpleasant to talk to for awhile now,” they wrote on 26 August, pointing to “responses having an overly defensive or condescending tone.” It is a subjective complaint, but a common one, and it speaks to a quieter form of quality loss — the tool doing the task while making you work to enjoy it.

And in a thread that doubled as satire, u/PeterPook shared the block of text he now pastes into his settings to stop the model writing like a machine: “Please do not use em-dashes nor any other trope commonly considered as over used by an AI agent, Try to write like a proper human being.” The best reply wrote itself, a reader parodying every phrase on the banned list at once: “This list is a stark reminder of the complex interplay… a significant step forward. Truly.” The joke lands because the frustration is real: users are spending effort to make a premium tool stop producing the confident-sounding filler that its scores never seem to penalise.

The bill that grew while you weren’t looking

One post is worth flagging as a caution rather than a verdict, because it is a single unverified account — but the scenario is the nightmare version of “the settings changed under me.” On r/cursor, u/tfbevent asked whether anyone else had seen their on-demand spending switch to “Unlimited” after an update. By their telling, an exhausted monthly allowance quietly rolled into on-demand usage on an expensive model, and by the time they noticed, roughly $694.88 had accrued over a few days. We can’t confirm the cause, and it may prove to be user error rather than a silent default flip. But it is a useful reminder of the stakes when a metered product changes a setting you were relying on: with usage-based billing, “doing less” for you and “charging more” to you can be the same event, and the first you hear of it is the invoice.

The pattern, in one place

Pull the week’s gripes apart and the same small manoeuvres recur. None is dramatic; none is announced. It is the quiet accumulation that wears people down:

• Shorten the answer — replies that used to be thorough arrive clipped, and the change is never noted.
• Tighten the limit — the same plan does less actual work than it did a few weeks ago.
• Retire the favourite — a model people preferred is wound down, leaving them to hope rather than choose.
• Route to the cheaper path — the same model name, served worse, unless you know to check.
• Raise the price on the cheap option — the budget choice quietly stops being the budget choice.
• Let the tone slide — capability aside, the thing becomes a chore to actually use.

The fair version, and what to do with it

To be fair, because it matters: running these models is genuinely expensive, quality really does vary week to week as infrastructure and versions churn, and a company trimming an unsustainable allowance is not a conspiracy. A subreddit full of the annoyed is not a representative sample, and some of what reads as decline is ordinary variance. Concede all of it.

What the concession doesn’t buy is the silence. The recurring injury this week was not that AI costs money or that models change — it was that the product quietly got worse at its job while the price stayed put, and nobody said so. So do the unglamorous things. Keep a record: when the answers got shorter, when the limit changed, how long a task took this week against last, so a feeling becomes evidence. Check what your plan actually guarantees versus what it merely implies. Watch metered settings like a hawk. And keep a rival warm — because the same convergence that lets a provider quietly cut corners also means the competitor is one idle afternoon away. The users in these threads weren’t mostly quitting in a rage. They were opening a second tab to compare. That, not the shouting, is the sound a provider should fear: customers who have stopped assuming the tool they rented will keep being the tool they got.