OpenAI, your paying users shouldn't have to become unpaid QA engineers just to get reliable responses.

[u/echoabenteuer]

OpenAI, what exactly is happening to ChatGPT's reliability?

I'm a long-time paying power user, and I'm genuinely tired of spending more time investigating bugs than actually using the product.

Over the past several days, I've documented disappearing responses, premature task completion, inconsistent instruction-following, and significant differences between Instant and Medium reasoning configurations.

And no, this isn't just another "the model feels worse" complaint.

I actually tested it.

Two models. Two A/B/A tests. The same suspicious pattern.

GPT-5.6:

• Medium → Successful. Response completed and remained visible.
• Instant → Failed. Generated response disappeared.
• Medium → Successful again.

GPT-6:

• Medium → Successful. All requested story events completed.
• Instant → Failed. Response ended prematurely.
• Medium → Successful again.

That's four successful Medium tests and two problematic Instant tests across two model generations.

The failures aren't identical, and I'm not claiming they necessarily share a root cause.

But this pattern deserves an actual technical explanation.

And the disappearing-response issue goes deeper.

During my earlier investigation, Chrome Developer Tools showed:

• HTTP 200 OK
• POST /backend-api/f/conversation
• text/event-stream
• SSE completion indicator: complete
• The response visibly generating
• The entire assistant message disappearing immediately afterward

I even reproduced the disappearing-response issue using GPT-5.5 in a completely new conversation.

I tested different devices, cleared cookies, collected screenshots, inspected network requests, and documented the behavior.

OpenAI Support Case: #16904787.

I've already provided extensive technical evidence to support.

What I still don't have is a confirmed root cause, a meaningful engineering update, or an ETA.

Here's the question I want OpenAI to answer.

Has the effective behavior of Instant changed?

OpenAI describes Instant as the faster option for everyday tasks, while Medium provides additional reasoning effort.

That's perfectly reasonable.

But does this mean long-form creative writing and complex multi-step instructions are now effectively expected to run on Medium?

Because that's what my recent tests seem to suggest.

Medium completes my stories more reliably, but often writes significantly more than I requested.

Instant tends to match my preferred length, but has shown serious reliability problems.

I've adjusted my custom instructions repeatedly, and the differences remain.

This is about more than creative writing.

People use ChatGPT for software development, research, professional work, creative projects, and long-term workflows.

When an assistant visibly generates a complete response and then loses it, that's not a minor inconvenience.

When it repeatedly stops before fulfilling explicit instructions, the user has to spend additional time checking and correcting the output.

And when support communication doesn't provide meaningful technical clarity, confidence in the product suffers.

I understand that debugging complex systems takes time.

I don't expect every issue to be fixed overnight.

But I do expect transparency about known problems, meaningful follow-up on documented reports, and reliable basic functionality.

What makes this especially frustrating?

I've already started testing Claude, Gemini, DeepSeek, and other alternatives.

Not because I wanted to leave ChatGPT.

But because I need tools that reliably support my work.

And yes, some competitors are producing surprisingly strong results.

I'm not claiming OpenAI deliberately degraded anything. I don't have evidence for that.

But the lack of clarity about these changes is frustrating.

So, OpenAI, here are my questions:

1. Have Instant's effective reasoning, stopping, or output-length configurations changed recently?
2. Are there known differences in response-finalization or persistence behavior between Instant and Medium?
3. Is long-form creative writing still an intended use case for Instant?
4. Are the disappearing-response reports being investigated?
5. Can users with documented support cases receive meaningful engineering updates?

I've already submitted the evidence.

I've already performed cross-model testing.

I've already documented the failures.

What I shouldn't have to do is reverse-engineer the behavior of a paid AI service just to understand why it no longer reliably completes the tasks it used to handle.

I originally subscribed to ChatGPT to work on my projects.

Instead, I've spent days acting as an unpaid QA engineer.

OpenAI, if your users are doing this much debugging for free, the least you can do is tell them whether you've identified the problem.

Because at this point, the competition isn't even the biggest threat to your customer retention.

The reliability of your own product is.

[u/decreement1]

happy for you, sorry if it happened

[u/Whole_Neat_3023]

This is exactly the kind of detailed breakdown that makes it impossible for them to just brush off as "user error" or vague model weirdness

The A/B/A pattern you documented is pretty damning, especially across two different model generations. That's not random variance anymore, that's a systematic difference in how Instant handles complex tasks. The disappearing response thing is wild too, seeing the full output then watching it vanish while the server says everything's fine is the kind of thing that makes you question your own sanity until you catch it on dev tools

I've been using ChatGPT for coding help and noticed something similar with Instant over the past week or so. It'll start strong, get about 60% through what I asked for, then just stop like it decided the job was done. Medium plows through the whole thing but sometimes adds way more than I needed. Feels like they tightened something in Instant's stopping criteria and it's now too aggressive

The support case number tells me you've been at this a while and still haven't gotten anything useful back. That's the part that stings most, you do all the work to hand them a reproducible bug on a silver platter and get silence in return

What competitors have you found that handle this better? I've been putting off testing alternatives but if Instant is gonna keep eating my longer prompts I might have to make the jump

[u/echoabenteuer → u/Whole_Neat_3023]

LMAOOO, WAIT. 😭💀😂

You’re telling me Instant does the EXACT same thing with your coding tasks that it does with my long-form stories?!

And Medium completes everything but sometimes writes an entire encyclopedia when you only asked for a properly finished task?

THAT’S LITERALLY MY EXPERIENCE. 😂

The fact that we’re seeing such similar behavior across completely different workloads is genuinely interesting. Your observation about potentially more aggressive stopping criteria is worth investigating, although we obviously can’t confirm what’s happening internally.

And regarding alternatives: Oh boy, I’ve been running my own little AI competition lately. 😂

Claude Sonnet 4.6: Probably my strongest alternative for natural writing, dialogue, and following detailed creative instructions. The biggest downside for me is the usage limits.
Google Gemini: Surprisingly impressive, especially for longer creative writing. I’ve tested both Flash and Pro configurations, and some of the results were genuinely excellent. It still needs supervision for technical accuracy and continuity, though.

DeepSeek: Pretty solid for more serious, atmospheric writing. However, I’ve noticed occasional timeline inconsistencies and skipped transitions in my tests.

Meta AI: A decent all-rounder, but it didn’t impress me as much for detailed, long-form writing.

For coding specifically, I haven’t done a controlled comparison across all these alternatives, so I wouldn’t claim that any particular one will definitely outperform ChatGPT for your workflow.

If I were in your position, I’d probably start by testing Claude and Gemini with the exact coding prompts that Instant keeps failing.

As for OpenAI Support, I’m still waiting for a meaningful technical explanation under case #16904787.

At this point, we’ve apparently discovered a new career path:

Unpaid AI Quality Assurance Engineer – specializing in models that forget to finish their homework. 💀😂

But seriously, thank you for sharing your experience. The fact that you’re observing similar Instant/Medium differences in coding makes this worth investigating further.

If you’re willing, could you try a controlled Medium → Instant → Medium test with the same coding task and share the results?

That would be extremely useful for comparing behavior across different workloads.

[u/triestdain]

"OpenAI, your paying users shouldn't have to become unpaid QA engineers just to get reliable responses."

100% this.

Everytime I have opened a ticket with them the amount of work and troubleshooting they expect me to do on their behalf is insane. If you don't do everything they ask for they just don't assist or look into the issue and close your ticket. 

IF YOU DO everything they ask for 90% of the time you get no actual resolution and a shitty apology and they close your ticket.