I think the places the average person starts out with AI do look like this. Most people are not paying a $20 a month Anthropic subscription just to try it out. They're using free chat apps, reading the garbage llm summary Google puts at the top of every search page, dealing with the low quality tools foisted on them in their email app or word processor.

Have all these gotten a lot better in the last year? Sure! But there's still a several-orders-of-magnitude difference in quality between whatever garbage tier of GPT-6 Luna you can use for free on `duck.ai` (just for one example) and Opus 5.5. Or even GLM 5.3 Flash. It's a way bigger difference than the improvement in ~free models has made up for in the last year, even though those improvements have been substantial.

I think a certain sort of person, if they do try to use something better along with a coding harness, as also immediately inclined to read along with the reasoning traces - and understandably gets freaked out by the nonsense it contains. That's a mistake, I think; not just because models behaving "reasonably" doesn't depend on the rationality of their reasoning traces, but also because I think if you transcribed my brain activity into a serial stream of text, I'm not convinced it would be more coherent.