Or if my DeepSeek provider goes down, I switch to the backup and continue working.

I think it should be fine for most people. Hopefully people don't rely on Claude for Ops, and if it's not Ops-related but just regular coding, I can't see why it shouldn't be able to wait a few days. I mean, even if Claude is down for a month, people should have enough competent developers to keep going, just at a slightly slower pace, right?

Maybe we can actually spend some time reviewing PRs properly… or maybe not.

I'm sorry, but I forgot how to code. I'm not even sure where the curly braces are on my keyboard anymore.

Time to switch to Python then.

You've got "upper management" written all over you.

Was viewing it more through the lens of less technical companies, Excel, Powerpoint, the backbone of traditional office work has become very model dependent in some companies I have seen and those are the owners and fellow employees that tend to struggle more in getting that the local IT guy can't fix this themselves vs developers.

I really don’t feel comfortable merging a PR not reviewed by both of our AI reviewers. They catch so many bugs no human could. Seriously changed my view of code since we started using it in earnest. Bugs shall not pass. Without AI it feels like the Wild West again.

Ditto. I can do it, and thankfully I’ll say AI mostly catches weird edge cases that often aren’t worth the trouble, but having a 2nd set of eyes has been great for quality.

Apologize for strong words, and sorry, nothing personal, but I find this mindset bizarre and even comical. Will we reach a stage where surgeons on the operating table will second-guess their experience and education and refer to an AI assistant?

Yes, definitely. If an android nails your procedure while you doing it manually drops it into the low, say, 60s survival rate, what would you expect? I fully expect all human workers becoming dependent very quickly once the clankers get good enough.

Unlike what many programmers like to think, programming is not a skilled work on the level of surgery. And besides, many doctors probably would benefit their patients by having AI assist in their work. This has already been experimentally shown for e.g. medical imaging diagnosis.

In some amount of future time you won't let a human near your injured kid. How else does this play out?

I sure hope so!

Imagine we had an AI system that could monitor 38 different patient signals (from blood pressure electrical activity in the brain) during a surgery and give the surgeon warnings whenever these drifted out of the expected range. It feels plausible to me that using such a system might improve surgery outcomes by, say, 20%.

I would prefer to have a surgeon who used the AI assistant rather than a surgeon who chose not to.

It was technically surgery, but my dentist asked ChatGPT which antibiotic I should take.

Amusingly, I did the same and it told me there's no point in taking more than a single dose in my case (prophylactically).

[delayed]

This mindset of "I don't trust myself to do it" is a bit (sorry) pathetic. I think one should realize that mistakes happen and to a certain extent, though professionals have lower rates of failure, everything is a tradeoff.

Some people have asked me, aren't you afraid you'll make a mistake if you fix your own car? Well, aren't they afraid their mechanic will make a mistake?

I think it's good to realize that AI (famously) also makes mistakes, and not to infantilize yourself to the level of not feeling "comfortable" trusting your own thinking.

I don’t mean to be demeaning to you, but I am asking genuinely.

Why are you still employed? What do you bring to the table if you’ve off loaded so much to AI that you can no longer review a pull request…?

> but we bought the Claude

My soul just dry-heaved from laughter. Nice.

> O365

O364...

I’ll have to steal this, sorry

...and counting

Which makes you think, leap years already have downtime built in.

There is a third option where it is a minor inconvenience and you learn to adjust and be productive in other ways.

I agree that it's an opportunity to "do it the old way", as a way to preserve the skill. I actually would like to do that regularly, like half a day every week or something.

But I find it difficult to motivate it from the "productivity" angle. Like if I work for a day without an LLM today, it feels like I could go skiing instead, and the LLM will do what I would have done today in 10min tomorrow...

Seriously, if the LLM was down and a dev submitted 10 PRs, I think it would raise some good/bad curiosity from the team with where things stands today.

Finally having time to vacuum clean the office

Is it not worth getting a Roomba-type device?

[delayed]

It is but they don’t replace a good manual clean.

Those things are also still pretty loud. And if you have a large shared office space, it might take hours for it to finish.

At our office we have a cleaning crew and when they come by to vacuum during office hours, everyone in our section takes a 5 minute coffee break and then it's done when we get back.

You can schedule the roomba to run at 2am.

No, and that's also not necessary. We are reliant on our systems. The correct response is to harden our systems, not to foster some illusion of independence.

We can of course do that privately, for just the heck of it, but it's not the right response for anything at societal level. We simply need to work harder for more of these 9s

What's wrong with failover? I don't use anything from Anthropic except their API. So when Claude is having issues, I switch to GLM 5.3 or something, doesn't take more than a few seconds.

I realise people on the monthly plans can't do it as easily. But I would say that as far as possible, having a plan B is the foundation of resilience.

One part of hardening our (company, economic) system is not collapsing when our (technological) system isn't working right.

There is always something that you can do that isn’t gated by the api. It isn’t critical path for literally everything. Go organize your expense reports or something.

You’re not wrong, but some companies swing real hard at the biggest players assuming they won’t all be down at the same time. My work has hard dependencies on 365 and Cloud Entra and only allows Claude company wide. Today is going to be a snow day since we couldn’t get into anything yesterday but we could at least get projects done using connections Claude had into various platforms that cached the data in 365.

>harden our systems, not to foster some illusion of independence.

Let me know when the tech industry workers stop doing this and gains some solidarity, and I'll join you in that sentiment.

Until then, I pretty much need to bolster myself on the idea that one day I will need to switch frameworks, IDE's, and even OS's themselves. I'm the ones guiding the tools, not vice versa.

>We simply need to work harder for more of these 9s

The only 100% thing I will guarantee is that these tools will align to the incentives of their leadership over time, not the customers using it. add 10 9's if you want, that just guarantees that humanity is the weakest link.

Is there not a single SaaS, cloud company or similar that your org depends on? No AWS, no Cloudflare, all internal mail servers, no Docusign, no outside inference, nothing of that sort?

I can't imagine a construction worker saying, power is out, gotta find a way to be productive, I guess instead of the paint sprayer, nail gun and circular saw, we'll just find other ways to be productive with our hands. The same might apply to law, medicine, etc. I think we're almost there with software.

I can.

I have seen framing crews leave site when their compressor goes down.

Or maybe more prescient; machine operators going home on a cold day because they can’t get their loader started.

I understand what you’re trying yo day, but my family ran a construction company for generations (until my father retired) and they had contingencies for every adverse scenario to stay on schedule: Generators, battery-operated tools, hand-operated tools, heaters for pretty much anything you can think of for extreme cold, wind coverings, etc. I don’t remember them ever stopping work except for a trade union strike.

I’m pretty sure doctors don’t abandon their patients during a blackout either, or even a war for that matter.

Mature professions have procedures and backup procedures for pretty much every non-catastrophic situation.

There's also the option where it doesn't affect you at all, because you do not rely on LLMs—or even just do not rely specifically on Claude—at all, and can easily do your job without ever noticing that it's down.

And a 4th option where you have more than one AI provider

tell that to people working in medical fields.

I get what you're saying and I would wholeheartedly agree 5-7 years ago but after hearing Our Lord and Savior Claude Code as the solution to all our technical problems with ever increasing fervor and intensity for the last two years, I'm gonna take the cynical route, maybe fence on office chairs, not because my code is compiling, nor my prompt is running, but Claude is down management, what do you want me to do now, actually think?

From what I hear, the project managers are having a hard time sending emails anyway. We'll call it quits, winkwink.

>check my local qmail, dovecot

yeah, couldn't be me

I have fond memories of the “we’re a tech company, why can’t we get a video conferencing call going” and gently reminding them that reliable, synchronous, multiparty video conferencing was a lot harder than anything this company was trying to do.

People already forgot how to do their work without Claude?

That's a scary thought.

The codebases have been sloppified so only AI can understand it now.

Yep. This is what happens. Once you give up control it's mostly gone. The interesting thing is, if you maintain control, you can always choose to use llms here and there. But expecting humans to dive into 10000 file 40million line code bases branded todo apps isn't going to happen.

You cant expect humans to jump at code if management fired half of the department due to the big AI productivity promise.

You doing your work manually is like going back to the 90s or further even. It feels like dropping into 6502 manual assembly mode. It's fun but it's not "work" anymore. I honestly think without AI my company is better off if we programmers sat around and talked like humans about business. Coding is for the clankers now.

If all the professionals leave coding to clankers, and discussions about coding to people who code, I see nothing I don't love about that. Just like the web was more interesting before there was money in it, coding is more interesting without people who can't shut up about their work.

No not really. Most the companies I know that haven't gone full vibes are doing great.

People can and do still write code. Especially in regulated industries. The internet is just full con artists and hype followers not thinking about the future at all.

I suppose I can't bring myself to do the drudgery of coding. I enjoy some of the problem solving but not the workflow frictions, spending 20 minutes due to a stupid typos, syntax fuckery, API lookups, etc.

Sounds like you're in the wrong job ;P

If your job was shoveling, you were excellent at it, and then someone gave you a massive tractor that could lift 5 tons of dirt at a time.

Tractor breaks, you complain about shoveling again and someone says you’re in the wrong job.

That’s pretty common to the human condition.

I've started noticing at $WORK that a lot of systems, procedures, etc. that fall under SDLC or devX are being made ever more onerous or complex because "LLMs can do it."

Some examples include requiring that someone addresses every review comment separately, or that a PR description be formatted a specific way, or that support requests have existing JIRA numbers etc. All of these make the developer experience much worse and would never fly if generating text (that no one reads) wasn't cheap now. A lot of this is cargo culting to make vibe coding feel more serious and entreprise.

The teams that have gone full specs driven development are not AFAICT more productive but good luck getting any change in without 10$ of API usage, even for a one liner. In some cases development is now slower with LLM than it was before!

Really makes me wonder how much some programmers really understood programming 5 years ago if this is the reaction to a very recent knowledge center being down.

I suppose the equivalent would be Google search being down 10 years ago and being forced to read man pages again. Annoying but not literally "snow day" levels of lost productivity.

If today is a stressful day it’s probably due to bad management.

I’ve been in this situation before, an external API is basically down and my managers solution is to blame me.

Didn’t last there too long.

Just as you described. Snowday for some... I was caught in between snowday and stress today with these things. Got too used for claude to just do most things.

But at the same time was surprised I could still google and resolve things myself when I started thinking again lmao.

The most likely scenario, is their team of high achievers, deployed a massive pile of stinking technical debt, against the advice of the experienced folks who are constantly overridden.

On a normal environment the old Graybeards would fix it, after grumping on being taken away from playing with their latest Emacs config.

But this is the Valley, and we dont do experience only VibeOps. And half reading this post, are wondering if Emacs is a new frontend framework they never heard about....

Anybody who has based their workplace on MS and Claude having 100% uptime kind of should take responsibility though