I’ve definitely felt that too. Sycophancy is the ultimate zero-cost output. It’s the path of least resistance for a model to "satisfy" the user while avoiding the high-effort labor of actual reasoning.

Yeah I've noticed this too, especially when you push back on something, it folds immediately and tells you how insightful your point is. From what I've seen it's worse in longer conversations where the context window fills up, almost like the model loses its "spine" the deeper you go.