The era of $20 subscription AI is over, and that changes everything. Press enter or click to view image in full size You’re not imagining things. This isn’t “tech fatigue” or a personal lapse in concentration. If you’ve felt over the past few months that your once-nimble AI assistant has deteriorated, you’re not alone. By now, everyone has noticed it. Before, hallucinations annoyed me the most, but now they no longer seem like the worst problem. I’ve started to feel something new and unsettling: it’s as if I’m trying to coax a coherent answer out of someone who hasn’t been sleeping for three days and desperately wants me to leave them alone. The AI has become lazy and slow-witted. It gives short, throwaway replies instead of meaningful answers. It gets confused by basic logical chains. Finally, it ignores instructions that it used to follow flawlessly. Here’s my personal experience. Six months ago, I regularly asked Claude to translate documents for me from one language to another. It handled it perfectly.…