One very unfortunate curse we are stuck with is LLM providers pulling the rug from under us and swapping models with quantized versions during peak demand or on monthly plans. You never know if that's the reason AI starts writing shitty code or it's just the context size that has grown. On top of that there is the queuing mechanism which makes tasks take longer. Sometimes AI is super fast and sometimes a simple task takes 10, 15 or even 20 minutes of "thinking". You may not realize this if you are just using your same subscription but if you switch between providers you can immediately tell. I advise everyone to invest $5 in openrouter, deepseek and qwencode. Just do an experiment and use same model (deepseek-4.1 flash) asking same prompt on same code, then look at the result. Spoiler: you will see trash coming out of openrouter at 1-5 tokens/second, you will see slightly faster and better quality output from qwencloud and when you get to deepseek API where you are paying per token you will not believe this is the same model. Because it isn't.