It's ~2026 –. ChatGPT still doesn't allow email change

No mention of the reason why. Seems like a foundation feature. Ran into trouble more than once by their bad auth system.

My five cents for a guess: they've used the email as an index somewhere, which massive amount of data now depends on and they keep pushing forward the need of migrating away from that because it'll be painful and take long time.

Maybe they could use Claude and speed up that development.

I’d say it’s a rookie mistake, but they’re a half-trillion dollar company, so maybe I _should_ use email address as an id?

Yeah, but imagine the first engineers at ChatGPT back in 2021, some thrown together group of people who knew frontend the best from OpenAI, a research lab, to create a quick prototype UI for chatting with a text generating ML model. Of course they'll take some shortcuts, that's to be expected. All of this is just guesses though, but seen similar things play out many times. Of course, at one point someone needs to step in and pause for a moment to plan ahead for a bit, but depending on the leadership, it isn't always so easy to do.

No doubt there’s a lesson in there, but I don’t think it’s a technical one.

Maybe they used ChatGPT 1.0 to vibe code it

That's a good guess .. but I bet they are also paying price for this in support costs .. I'd be curious what percentage of their support tickets are related to this (also the require you to cancel subscription, create a new account, create a new subscription if you want to change a pro account)