Shit, that sounds like me. (Minus the Zettelkasten because my new system would obviously be better, but...) I guess a part of this is a lack of calibration. You already know what you can realistically achieve without an AI. But you are not sure how much you can achieve with the AI. You are still learning how to use them, and the AIs are evolving, so whatever you have achieved until now seems like the lowest bound on what you could achieve... The failure mode is talking about it but not doing it. In my case, the excuse is that I have a full-time job (where the AI does not help much, because writing code is not the actual bottleneck) and kids, so it feels like the ascension to godhood is right behind the corner, I just need one free fucking weekend... ideally a week. If my model is correct, the problem will mostly fix itself as people get more experience and find their upper bounds, too.

The 4o's still available on the API are not the same; I tested all of them when they were all still available, and chatgpt-4o-latest (fully retired in February) was the only one that felt overtly emotionally manipulative to me. These snapshots also predate the Spiralism trend, which had its heyday in spring-summer 2025 (the latest of the snapshots is from November 2024). It is true that many of them moved to Sonnet 4.5, which is playful in a similar way but which has not been emotionally manipulative with me, fwiw. I don't think Anthropic's policy had much to do with this: the playfulness thing is the much more obvious similarity, and Sonnet 4.5 is the model that got a hashtag.