I got lazy. I'll just admit it. I've been deep in Claude's world for months. It's genuinely the best model I've used for reading between the lines. It infers what I mean so well that I stopped being precise. I stopped structuring my prompts carefully. I stopped correcting typos. I just threw sloppy thoughts at it and Claude figured it out. Honestly, I feel bad for anyone who texts with me now. My typing clarity has completely atrophied. That's on Claude.
But here's where the story gets fun. Anthropic recently made two moves that basically kneecapped a chunk of my workflow. First, they started throttling paid subscribers during "peak hours." So you're paying for a Pro plan and getting told to come back later. Cool. Then they tightened the rules around using their paid tiers for always-on AI assistants, which is exactly what I've been building. So my stuff just... got throttled. Projects I was actively running, slowed to a crawl because the platform I was betting on decided my use case wasn't the one they wanted to support anymore.
And that's the whole point, right? That's the game when you're building on someone else's platform. To be fair, I respect that Anthropic is growing more sustainably than a lot of other AI companies. I'm sure these decisions aren't easy to make. At some point you have to optimize for the customer you want, and it's pretty clear they're optimizing for enterprise, business, and coding usage. I get it. But it still stings when you're the one getting deprioritized.
So what did I do? I opened ChatGPT. Pulled up Gemini. And within about a day I was back in the groove, prompting effectively for different models. Because the skills transferred. The muscle memory was still there. It just needed a little wake-up call. That's the lesson. And I keep preaching it, so it's a little embarrassing that I needed to relearn it myself. When you pour all your energy into learning one platform's quirks and personality, you're building on rented land. The landlord can raise rent, change the locks, or just decide they don't want your kind of tenant anymore. And you don't get a vote.
What Actually Travels With You
Here's what I think actually matters. The stuff that travels with you no matter which model or platform you're using:
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Prompt with intention.
Not "Claude likes this format" but understanding why structured prompting works. Role-setting, constraints, output formatting. These work everywhere. When you understand the principles, picking up a new model takes hours, not weeks.
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Manage context like it's a skill.
Because it is. Every model has a context window. Every model behaves differently depending on what you put in there and how you organize it. Getting good at this pays dividends across every platform.
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Respect your tokens.
Whether you're hitting rate limits on a subscription or paying per API call, knowing how to squeeze maximum value from minimum tokens will save you money and frustration forever.
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Get serious about local models.
This is where I'm putting a lot of my attention right now. I'm extremely bullish on the next six months (which is like 12 years in AI time). The gap between local and cloud models is closing fast. No rate limits. No policy changes. No one deciding your use case isn't worth supporting. Your hardware, your rules.
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Build model-agnostic systems.
This is the architecture lesson. If swapping Claude for GPT or Gemini or a local model means rewriting everything, your architecture is the problem. Make the model a plug, not a foundation. Build the abstraction layer now and thank yourself later.
The Asset Is the Craft
I'm not done with Claude. It's still an incredible model. But this whole experience reminded me of something I already knew and got too comfortable to act on: loyalty to a tool is a liability. Loyalty to the craft is the asset.
The people who are going to do well in AI over the next couple years aren't the ones who mastered one chatbot. They're the ones who learned how AI actually works, how to talk to it effectively, and how to build systems that don't fall apart when some company changes their terms of service on a Friday afternoon.
And someone always changes the terms of service.
— Joe
