It seems to coincide with the updated UI and the release of the Gemini 3.5 Preview model.
For the better part of this year, Gemini was my go-to model for answering simple questions quickly. The google search plug-in made it super easy to ask, and it seemed to have endless capacity for research and complex answers on the $20/month plan. Meanwhile, I used Claude very sparingly, and saved most of my Pro plan for Claude Code tokens. Now I find that I'm rate-limited by Gemini harder than Claude. Is compute being shifted away from Gemini behind the scenes?
Maybe LLM compute is finally moving away from subsidized direct consumer use. Still, I had previously thought that Gemini would be the last man standing in that use case, as Google seemed to have the most money to burn.
