A support ticket lands on my desk. The user's already "tried to solve it" — with an AI, of course. I paste the same question into my own tooling and get a different answer. Sometimes a better one, sometimes one that flatly contradicts theirs. Both delivered with the exact same confidence.

There's a bifurcation happening in how people use AI, and it's not the abstract thing the think-pieces describe. It lands in my ticket queue. One person has the good model, the right tools, and knows to distrust the output. The other has the free default and takes the first confident paragraph as gospel.

And "the free default" is doing real work there. Since December, ChatGPT's free and $5 tiers get quietly routed to the cheapest, fastest model — no reasoning, unless you know to ask for it. Paid keeps the smart router. Handing free users the good one by default turned out to be too expensive to keep.

Don't trust AI output. Especially not the free output.

Which is why I want self-hosted models to get good — fast. The output I can actually trust is the one I can run and inspect myself, not the one a subscription tier decides I deserve today.