It felt like a dumber Cline (it was)
Two hours fighting an unsolvable bug that wasn't a bug: an update had silently switched the model underneath me.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 2:53 (la actualización silenciosa)
- ↳ video diary @ 3:53 (el culpable, Gemini 2.0 por defecto)
Today’s two hours of lost life, donated to the archive so you can keep yours. Cline updated. I kept working. Suddenly a problem I’d normally dispatch wouldn’t die: attempt after attempt, even with Gemini writing precise instructions for it, nothing landed ▸ 2:53. The feeling was specific and strange: like working with an inferior Cline ▸ 3:25.
The feeling was data. The update had reset my model selection to Gemini 2.0, an old model, by default, in a dropdown you have to go looking for ▸ 3:53. Two to three hours of “why is everything impossible today” resolved by one click ▸ 4:26. Problems that had been walls fell in minutes afterward ▸ 4:40.
¿con quién estoy hablando realmente? →
The heuristic worth keeping
When your AI assistant suddenly can’t do anything it could do yesterday, don’t debug your problem first. Debug your setup: which model is actually selected, what did the last update reset, what default got restored. Tools now swap their brains silently, and a degraded assistant produces symptoms identical to an impossible task. The tell is the feeling: if it seems dumber, believe yourself, and check the dropdown before you check your code…
// continued in
no entry has continued this idea yet: the arc is still open