The "Getting Dumber" Accusation
The author's impression represents a fair share of heavy users' experience: a tool that was once handy noticeably declined at some point, handling complex tasks worse, needing more guidance, with unstable output quality. What makes this piece special is that the author isn't a novice but a veteran who uses it heavily every day, and he gives concrete comparison scenarios: for a similar refactoring task, it used to nail it in one pass, and now it repeatedly veers off. Detailed records from experienced users like this carry far more weight than a vague "feels dumber"—they're not easily dismissed with a breezy "the user doesn't know how to use it."
Trust Wears Away in Opacity
Worth noting is the cumulative effect of posts like this: a single one could be called an illusion, but when a dozen mutually independent, detail-consistent records surface in the same period, the "collective illusion" explanation grows increasingly untenable. In hindsight, this February wave of complaints was precisely the prelude to the problem admitted in April's official postmortem—users' perception preceded the vendor's admission by two months. This also offers a rare comparison case for the old debate of "users say it got dumber, the vendor says nothing changed": this time, the users were right.
via: Hacker News