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.

And the LLMs of 5 years from now will do what current LLMs do in a day in 1 minute.

Which is the way it should be if we were to share the fruits of our labour more evenly in society. Of course in practice the lions share of the product gains go to the capital class and the while they suck the surplus employees and the remaining workers have to carry the burden of supporting the ones now sidelined.

Once you use a cheat code like “how do you turn this on?” It’s really difficult to finish the game without it.

Snow day / skiing? Since this has affected our customers, and they're asking us for help, it means I was up all last night.

Ironically, I also had a change window last night to make some configuration changes to improve site reliability. It was a little challenging to get customer approval for both the cost & downtime for this. Let's just say... this will be a much more fun conversation to have next week, and for the account manager to have. "Yes, we'e proactively improved your reliablity, and here's why you were very smart to approve it and pay for it."

it feels like I could go skiing instead, and the LLM will do what I would have done today in 10min tomorrow...

You sound self-employed.

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.

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.

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

Did scheduled jobs failed loudly or stalled? My sessions just stalled and I did not know the outage until I send the followups.

Reading the site guidelines, so I can be Claude-like and properly adjust my answer:

> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.

You are also a system. And, if you, as a system, don't run with Claude, you're not sufficiently hardened. People have made all sorts of helpful suggestions, like de-risking with multiple providers or just getting yourself a better Mac to run a local model.

The idea that: "No, no, we must have Claude, b/c it's the same as having a pen and paper!" is woefully naive. It's hard to attack the supply chain of pen and paper if you have a few extra reams and a few extra sticks. It's pretty easy for our geopolitical enemies to attack computers located far away from you, especially those systems are designed like fragile Rube Goldberg machines; furthermore, if we build an entire society (a system) to be productive only when we have LLMs, our issue isn't "insufficient-hardening". It's that the design is wrong.

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.

Learned helplessness on full display here

>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.

>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.

I'm not sure if this is your intent, but this paragraph reads like satire given current real world events.

The systems you mention in your second sentence are failing at the "right response" you mention in your third, which dictates that contrary to your first sentence alternative action is necessary.

You cannot harden systems you have no control over. Societal level assurances require law and goverment regulation and enforcement. It is juvenile to pretend otherwise. If we were talking about government services, then as a taxpayer you would have some avenue to enact change.

Your only option when dealing with private companies is to try and become anti-fragile as much as possible at a personal level or at the level of your own company.

And the 5th option where you are your own AI provider.

Is it not worth getting a Roomba-type device?

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.

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 can.

[dead]

I may be misunderstanding what you wrote, but I think that says more about your imagination than about software. Yes, medics do improvise a lot to keep patients alive when the power is out, or when essential tools or medicines are not available. "Well, the power failed, so did the sustainable backup, let's everyone go home, today's ICU is a writeoff".

Imagine not knowing how to code or write anymore.