Comment by FitchApps

I've had a fairly long career as a web dev. When I started, I used to be finicky about configuring my dev environment so that if the internet went down I could still do some kind of work. But over time, partly as I worked on bigger projects and partly as the industry changed, that became infeasible.

So you know what do, what I've been doing for about a decade, if the internet goes down? I stop working. And over that time I've worked in many places around the world, developing countries, tropical islands, small huts on remote mountains. And I've lost maybe a day of work because of connectivity issues. I've been deep in a rainforest during a monsoon and still had 4g connection.

If Anthropic goes down I can switch to Gemini. If I run out of credits (people use credits? I only use a monthly subscription) then I can find enough free credits around to get some basic work done. Increasingly, I could run a local model that would be good enough for some things and that'll become even better in the future. So no, I don't think these are any kind of valid arguments. Everyone relies on online services for their work these days, for banking, messaging, office work, etc. If there's some kind of catastrophe that breaks this, we're all screwed, not just the coders who rely on LLMs.

Same thing you do if AWS goes down. Same thing we used to do back in the desktop days when the power went out. Heck one day before WFH was common we all got the afternoon off 'cause the toilets were busted and they couldn't keep 100 people in an office with no toilets. Stuff happens. And if that's really not acceptable, you invest in solutions with the understanding that you're dumping a lot of cash into inefficient solutions for rare problems.

The stack overflow era wasn’t that long ago and none of us could write a library call without consulting online sources.

You are at least a decade late to post fears about developers reliance on the internet. It was complete well before the LLM era

I am not convinced of the wonderfulness, because the study implies that AI does not improve task completion time but does reduce programmer's comprehension when using a new library.

At some point it will get treated like infrastructure, what a typical SWE is doing when cloudfare is broken or AWS is down.

Yeah! I use JetBrains AI assistant sometimes, which suddenly showing only blank window, nothing else. So, not getting anything out of it. But I can see my credits are being spent!

IF I was totally dependent on it, I would be in trouble. Fortunately I am not.

It’s like with most programmers today having forgotten assembly. If their compiler breaks, what are they going to do?!

(I jest a bit, actually agree since turning assembly->compiled code is a tighter problem space than requirements in natural language->code)

The tools are going to ~zero (~ 5 years). The open source LLM's are here. No one can put them back or take them down. No internet, no problem. I don't see a long term future in frontier llm companies.

> - you lose internet connection or the agent is misconfigured or you simply ran out of credits.

What happens when github goes down. You shrug and take a long lunch.

> This is all wonderful and all but what happens when these tools aren't available - you lose internet connection or the agent is misconfigured or you simply ran out of credits. How would someone support their business / software / livelihood?

This is why I suggest developers use the free time they gain back writing documentation for their software (preferably in your own words not just AI slop), reading official docs, sharpening your sword, learning design patterns more thoroughly. The more you know about the code / how to code, the more you can guide the model to pick a better route for a solution.

Or your business gets flagged by an automated system for dubious reasons with no way to appeal. It's the old story of big tech: they pretend to be on your side first, but their motives are nefarious.