we panic that Claude "got worse" after every single release, adapt within a week, and then forget we ever panicked

i've been here long enough to have watched this exact cycle run maybe six times now, and it's so predictable i could set a clock by it. a new model ships. within about 48 hours the sub fills with "is it just me or did Claude get dumber," people posting screenshots of it fumbling something, the "i'm cancelling" threads, the confident declarations that Anthropic ruined it. the mood is genuinely bleak for about a week. then, quietly, everyone adjusts. we figure out the new model wants slightly different prompt