Build1 publisher3 min readPublished
Users report AI tools quietly giving shorter answers, with no changelog to explain the change
Reddit users spent late August describing Perplexity answers getting shorter, a Codex allowance draining faster and a Gemini version slipping away, and dev.to says its two-day snapshot of those posts is not a survey.
The Engineer · Build desk
What happened
- dev.to's The AI Downside collected public Reddit posts from roughly two days in late August in which paying users described shorter answers, tighter limits and a retired model, with no changelog explaining any of it.
- On r/OpenAI, u/MrZi5 said on 26 August that he hit the reintroduced five-hour Codex window in less than an hour on fairly small coding tasks and that OpenAI had lowered Plus usage limits.
- dev.to says the Gemini community's conclusion that Google shelved 3.5 Pro is inferred rather than confirmed, and that deprecation itself is routine.
Compiled by The EngineerSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- constraint A customer who did not store last month's output cannot demonstrate that this month's is shorter, so the strongest version of the complaint stays a description, and dev.to says no release note marks that kind of change anyway.
- decision Teams on these APIs have to pick which of their own prompts and input files become dated, scheduled regression cases now, because a case built after the suspicion has no baseline in it.
- exposure Anyone whose prompts are tuned to one model version is exposed to that version being withdrawn while its status is only inferred from user observation.
- contradiction dev.to's own caveat that forum complaints skew toward the annoyed cuts against reading the week as a measured drop in capability. The rate-limit posts carry more weight than the prose-quality ones.
Answer length is countable, and proving it fell needs the earlier answers, dated, against the same prompt. u/ASuperMarioFan1993OC, a Perplexity user of three years, wrote on 26 August: "I feel like Perplexity's answers have been stripped away" [3]. The same post said: "Perplexity has gotten lazy with it's answers/responses. Answers /response have gotten way shorter." [4] dev.to's write-up says a change of that kind is "exactly the kind of change no release note ever marks" [15].
The usage complaint arrives with numbers attached. Hitting the cap in less than an hour empties the quota in under a fifth of the five-hour window, leaving four hours or more before it resets [13]. "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," u/MrZi5 wrote [7]. Read "a few days" as three, and the allowance he describes covers about half the elapsed time it used to [14]. A reply in the same thread said "It used to give far more usage on this very plan a few weeks back" [8]. Requests and tokens are logged on both sides of that argument, and dev.to writes that nothing on the pricing page changed while the amount of actual work the plan allows shrank [12].
The file-processing report is the one that converts straight into a test. u/Not_An_itDog_94 described modest spreadsheets and config files, the sort the product had handled before, now failing [5]. The input there is a file. If the file is still on disk, you have a regression case: same upload, same prompt, run on a schedule, output stored with a timestamp. A length or tone complaint gets you a case like that only if you were already storing output before you noticed anything.
Version identity is the other half of the same problem. "Google abandoned 3.5 pro," wrote u/boxwrenchx in a heavily upvoted post on 26 August [9]. "Many of us are still holding Onto Gemini 3.5 Pro Hope," wrote u/OdiseoX2 the same day [10]. dev.to says deprecation is routine and that the specifics here are inferred, not confirmed [11]. For anyone whose prompts are tuned to one version, the field to record per call is which version served it, with the time.
dev.to calls the collection "a curated snapshot of public posts over roughly two days, not a survey" and says forum complaints skew toward the annoyed [2]. So none of this establishes that a capability fell. It does describe a category of complaint where the paying customer has nothing dated to hold up, and the piece says that is harder to point at and easier for a company to deny [12].
What to watch
- A dated changelog entry from Perplexity covering answer length or file handling would move this from anecdote to record.
- Any published number for the Plus allowance behind the reintroduced five-hour Codex window.
- Whether Google states a retirement date for Gemini 3.5 Pro, since dev.to says the specifics are inferred.