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.