This is almost certainly a software issue, though. Even if it's due to scaling, they still built a system that failed catastrophically rather than degrading gracefully.

I would bet that they have inference setup for internal use on a separate system from the customer-facing production environment. The same way telemetry infrastructure needs to be run separate from normal production systems, so you aren't "blind" when you need it most.

Based on this outage: not very well.

This is ( or will be in the future ) a surprisingly relevant issue

maybe they ask a secondary agentic system to fix it. will that be the future of “redundancy”?

"Gemini, fix my Claude infra"

lol probably use their dev or qa Claude environment to fix prod

This is not like that.

This is literally they saying they are letting their LLM run wild(ish) and seeing the status.claude.com we can see the result.

This is a case where the outcome is the direct result of the engineering practices like the ones they describe.

PS: Yes I use Claude, Coded, Amp and Cursor agents every day so I am not saying here LLMs are not valuable.

LE: They did not made claims that "AI is good" they made claims that developers/computer engineers are not needed anymore in the near future. Thats is a stronger claim and has a direct relation with a product they have which needs computer engineering (yes infra counts too) and which seems to be down more than we expect as a good quality bar.

If you go around bragging that you use AI for everything as part of your marketing plan, then don't be surprised that people blame you heavy AI usage when you have a problem.

There’s a difference between having normal levels of difficulty and bad luck, and having people blame those on the wrong thing, vs having extraordinarily miserable quality and having people find the obvious difference. Potentially yes, they might have terrible wiring in their office or a crippling fondness for vim. But if I were their PR department I’d be talking about that if it was the problem.

Ahem...

"Vegans and vegetarians may have higher stroke risk" - https://www.bbc.com/news/health-49579820

"Vegans had a 43% higher risk of fractures overall compared to nonvegetarians, as well as higher risks of hip, leg, and vertebral fractures." - https://sniglobal.org/plant-based-diets-and-fracture-risk/

"The Impact of a Vegan Diet on Many Aspects of Health: The Overlooked Side of Veganism" - https://www.cureus.com/articles/138315-the-impact-of-a-vegan...

"..people who followed a vegan diet had noticeably low levels of iodine in their bodies, an element that is essential for growth, bones, and brain function. In addition, vegans had lower bone health scores..." - https://www.bfr.bund.de/en/press-release/vegan-vegetarian-be...

oh-my-pi is a bit of a cross between the two; comes with basically everything OpenCode does, but still easy to customise.

OpenCode is nice if you don't want to do a lot of research and just want to get started right away. The OpenCode Go plan for $5 a month for your first month is a great way to do this, with good models to choose from and reasonable usage limits for a beginner.

They are different models. OpenCode is trying to be a claude code/codex replacement, where-as pi is something you build yourself, kind of trying to be an emacs type thing compared to vs-code. As in emacs it is more common to write your own extensions, where as in vs-code most people just download them.

I like it.

One caveat is that it doesn't do MCP tools, but can wire them up with bash (or use CLIs if those are available).

I am genuinely curious what it tells you, as "curl https//.. | sh" has long been an enormously popular approach to distribution in the open source world. Homebrew, to name just one example, advertises a similar method.

(pi.sh also documents other install methods, like `npm`, on their homepage)

If trust and security is the issue, unfortunately "better" ideas like hashpipe [1] never achieved critical mass

    [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9318286

Claude Code does it the same way (which doesn't excuse it obviously) but still.

curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/quickstart

Seriously, what is the threat model here?

I get this, and would recently have had a similar reaction. But I have to ask: do you typically run your agent harness in yolo mode?

Yeah, totally reasonable comment given the utter security that must come from anthropic with their installer, amiright?

oh wait...

"curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | bash"

(right from https://claude.com/product/claude-code)

Further - what the flicking fuck do you think an installer is going to do on your system? Not run any commands? Because I've written installers for every platform... they ALL can run commands.

So what exactly is the complaint in this comment? If you want to go read the install script - knock yourself out (or hell, point your agent at it...).

it tells you they're just like basically every other CLI targeting project for the last 15 years? I mean is it a big security hole we all accept, yes, it is. But it's not really indicative of much. That's also how I install rust.

My dude - if you're going to trust them then you're going to trust them.

You think it's hard to obfuscate shell calls from inside a built executable?

What it tells us is that you're probably searching for reasons to grouse about AI.

both the Julia and Rust programming languages use curl -> sh to install

In general I agree with you, but on the other hand it is an agentic coding agent you should have isolated in a container or VM anyway

Yes, that's what the comment means.

We are back to the baseline. The availability of our tools isn't adding anything in the long term because the productivity increase we get from the tooling is negated by the time we're back to doing it the old fashioned way due to downtime, so there is no claimed productivity increase espoused by the pontificators of the tooling.

The bunch of MD files in the codebase is becoming "tech" debt. It's just English prose, sure, but thousands of lines of English prose. Terse. Succinct. Difficult (if not impossible) to maintain manually without LLMs. That's not "baseline"

At some point it won't be true. Same with handwriting, nowadays I feel like a 7 y/o when I need to write something on a piece of paper...

The baseline is forever gone. Good luck convincing people to contribute to StackOverflow v2 after this.

With atrophy to our not-AI ability to do things

When that downtime happens is way more important than the amount of it. Imagine if your payroll system was down for 8 hours a month, but it just so happened to be the day payroll do their calculations?

Claude is 0.89% downtime. Getting close to one nine.

There aren't many tools that remain useful at that rate.

'Claude for Government' is the only one with 0.07% downtime, claude.ai has 0.89% downtime and claude code 0.74% - imo, that's a lot of downtime!

Gotta keep my 100x developer cred, that 0.07% is everything.

That doesn’t disqualify humans. It highlights the difference I am talking about.

Those chemical interactions and quantum effects lead to emergent properties like judgment, experience, context, accountability, and an understanding of consequences. Those are not properties that LLMs possess, regardless of how useful their output can be.

That is not to say that, in the future, LLMs won’t be used as part of other systems that add some of those properties. But that is not what we have today, or what can be seen in the foreseeable near future.

doing 2x 3 times already gets you almost 10x increase

Developers who can code without LLMs will go extinct in couple years and there will be legends about them, you should at least have some decent open weight model as a backup

What exactly is a developer in a scenario where no one can code?

> Any sensible employer will do the same.

Hard to do when each individual provider wants to lock your company into multiyear enterprise contracts.

How many developers are making 2 million a year?

400k isn’t crazy for the FANG set but it’s still a subset of the developer market and hundreds of thousands of those jobs have been cut in the last few years as they all collectively work to lower SWE pay.

60k a year it needs to be a full irreplaceable part of the infrastructure for I think. There are very few kinds of software that meet that bar right now (certain design tools etc that have no replacement). 12k/year is in the expensive but reasonable for the right tooling category (Matlab etc.).

I don’t know what the future holds. I know the big AI companies are banking on being able to charge for a replacement SWE that works 24/7. Still not convinced these are it yet, as useful as they can be under the right circumstances.

Where is GLM 5.2?

> I'm perfectly capable of programming without internet

Me too, but let's be honest, I'm not talking about "Hello world!" experiments, I'm talking about developing usable software. I'm pretty sure, you won't be patching a Linux kernel driver on your own machine without googling stuff.

I've learned to code years before the Internet, but we've had it for so long, I'm honestly not sure anymore if I'm truly capable of building [real] stuff while offline. And I can't just ignore it, there's a feeling now, that with AI advancements, I may soon no longer be able to code efficiently without any AI.

It depends on the language but agreed. If I didn't have internet or AI access, I'd still be able to pull out manpages or dig into source code.

I wouldn't like it and it'd be slower, but I still understand my environment in sufficient depth to work without external info if I absolutely have to. Even with AI, once in a while I ask it to just give me some hints instead of solving something for me, so I'm forced to do the work.

L take. My last 2 companies had their environments spun up in cloud instances.

"Running your dev stack" is not the same as "developing [usable] software".

>> It’s 36°C outside

Yeah AI Data Centers do that....

Don't worry they've got a dude named Claude they keep in the back just for occasions like this

Thanks for your contribution to this problem. Keen to see what you come up with next!