Elevated Errors in Claude.ai

8 hours ago (status.claude.com)

AI has normalized single 9's of availability, even for non-AI companies such as Github that have to rapidly adapt to AI aided scaleups in patterns of use. Understandably, because GPU capacity is pre-allocated months to years in advance, in large discrete chunks to either inference or training, with a modest buffer that exists mainly so you can cannibalize experimental research jobs during spikes. It's just not financially viable to have spades of reserve capacity. These days in particular when supply chains are already under great strain and we're starting to be bottlenecked on chip production. And if they got around it by serving a quantized or otherwise ablated model (a common strategy in some instances), all the new people would be disappointed and it would damage trust.

Less 9's are a reasonable tradeoff for the ability to ship AI to everyone I suppose. That's one way to prove the technology isn't reliable enough to be shipped into autonomous kill chains just yet lol.

I switched from OpenAI to Anthropic over the weekend due to the OpenAI fiasco.

I haven't been using the service long enough to comment on the quality of the responses/code generation, although the outages are really quite impactful.

I feel like half of my attempted times using Claude have been met with an Error or Outage, meanwhile the usage limits seem quite intense on Claude Code. I asked Claude to make a website to search a database. It took about 6 minutes for Claude to make it, meanwhile it used 60% of my 4h quota window. I wasn't able to re-find it past asking it to make some basic font changes until I became limited. Under 30 minutes and my entire 4 hour window was used up.

Meanwhile with ChatGPT Codex, a multi-hour coding session would still have 20%+ available at the end of the 4/5 hour window.

  • I have been using anthropic almost exclusively for a year, while trying other models, and this has literally never happened. I have NEVER experienced a downtime event. At most a random error in a chat but that is immediately solved on the subsequent request. I use the desktop app, the mobile app, the api with several apps in production that I monitor and reliability has never been an issue.

    I pay about $1500 per month on personal api use fyi.

  • Codex limits are weird, I can’t barely use up all the limits of the basic subscription.

    Switched to Claude max just because I can combine both. I can say since the weekend, I only have had problems. When it works it’s great. But I am seriously thinking to just cancelling this experiment.

  • You're not wrong, for sufficient simple cases it's at a disadvantage. But once things get complicated, it wins by being the only thing that you can get to work without going insane.

    And yeah, any serious use completely assumes a Max sub.

  • I suspect the spike in problems is due to a major spike in usage and uptake as a lot of folks are doing what you’re doing.

Yeah, the influx of people is disrupting my work, but it brings me joy to witness OpenAI’s decline in consumer support. So much for their Jonny Ive product, whatever it was.

Are employees from Anthropic botting this post now? This should be one of the top most voted posts in this website but it's nowhere on the first 3 pages.

Also remember, using claude to code might make the company you're working for richer. But you are forgetting your skills (seen it first hand), and you're not learning anything new. Professionally you are downgrading. Your next interview won't be testing your AI skills.

  • > Your next interview won't be testing your AI skills.

    You are living under quite a big rock.

    • Literally every interview I've done recently has included the question: "What's your stance on AI coding tools?" And there's clearly a right and wrong answer.

    • What rock?

      C'mon let's be real here, there's either "testing AI skills" versus "using AI agents like you would on the daily".

      The signal got from leetcode is already dubious to assert profeciency and it's mostly used as a filter for "Are you willing to cram useless knowledge and write code under pressure to get the job?" just like system design is. You won't be doing any system design for "scale" anywhere in any big tech because you have architects for that nor do you need to "know" anything, it's mostly gatekeeping but the truth is, LLMs democratized both leetcode and system design anyway. Anyone with the right prompting skills can now get to an output that's good for 99% of the cases and the other 1% are reserved for architecs/staff engineers to "design" for you.

      The crux of the matter is, companies do not want to shift how they approach interviews for the new era because we have collectively believed that the current process is good enough as-is. Again, I'd argue this is questionable given how sometimes these services break with every new product launch or "under load" (where YO SYSTEM DESIGN SKILLZ AT).

    • If you can only code with AI, soon you won't have interviews at all because there's no reason to hire you, as the managers can just type the prompts themselves. Or at least that's what I've been led to believe by the marketing.

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  • If you're not learning anything new, you're doing it wrong.

    There's a massive gap between just using an LLM and using it optimally, e.g. with a proper harness, customised to your workflows, with sub-agents etc.

    It's a different skill-set, and if you're going to go into another job that requires manual coding without any AI tools, by all means, then you need to focus on keeping those skills sharp.

    Meanwhile, my last interview already did test my AI skills.

    • Have any descriptions or analysis of what is considered "properly" on the cutting edge? I'm very curious. Only part of my profession is coding. But it would be nice to get insight into how people who really try to learn with these tools work.

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    • > Meanwhile, my last interview already did test my AI skills.

      Curious to hear more about this.

  • > But you are forgetting your skills

    Depends on what you consider your "skills". You can always relearn syntax, but you're certainly not going to forget your experience building architectures and developing a maintainable codebase. LLMs only do the what for you, not the why (or you're using it wrong).

    • There are three sides to this depending on when you started working in this field.

      For the people who started before the LLM craze, they won't lose their skills if they are just focusing on their original roles. The truth is people are being assigned more than their original roles in most companies. Backend developers being tasked with frontend, devops, qa roles and then letting go of the others. This is happening right now. https://www.reddit.com/r/developersIndia/comments/1rinv3z/ju... When this happens, they don't care or have the mental capacity to care about a codebase in a language they never worked before. People here talk about guiding the llms, but at most places they are too exhausted to carry that context and let claude review it's own code.

      For the people who are starting right now, they're discouraged from all sides for writing code themselves. They'll never understand why an architecture is designed a certain way. Sure ask the llm to explain but it's like learning to swim by reading a book. They have to blindly trust the code and keep hitting it like a casino machine (forgot the name, excuse me) burning tokens which makes these companies more money.

      For the people who are yet to begin, sorry for having to start in a world where a few companies hold everyone's skills hostage.

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    • The syntax argument is correct, but from what I am seeing, people _are_ using it wrong, i.e. they have started offloading most of their problem solving to be LLM first, not just using it to maybe refine their ideas, but starting there.

      That is a very real concern, I've had to chase engineers to ensure that they are not blindly accepting everything that the LLM is saying, encouraging them to first form some sense of what the solution could be and then use the LLM to refine it further.

      As more and more thinking is offloaded to LLMs, people lose their gut instinct about how their systems are designed.

  • > not learning anything new

    Huge disagree. Or likely more "depends on how you use it". I've learned a lot since I started using AI to help me with my projects, as I prompt it in such a way that if I'm going about something the "wrong" way, it'll tell me and suggest a better approach. Or just generally help me fill out my knowledge whenever I'm vague in my planning.

  • > But you are forgetting your skills (seen it first hand), and you're not learning anything new.

    This is just false. I may forget how to write code by hand, but I'm playing with things I never imagined I would have time and ability to, and getting engineering experience that 15 years of hands on engineering couldn't give me.

    > Your next interview won't be testing your AI skills.

    Which will be a very good signal to me that it's not a good match. If my next interview is leetcode-style, I will fail catastrophically, but then again, I no longer have any desire to be a code writer - AI does it better than me. I want to be a problem solver.

    • > getting engineering experience that 15 years of hands on engineering couldn't give me.

      This is the equivalent of how watching someone climb mountain everest in a tv show or youtube makes you feel like you did it too. You never did, your brain got the feeling that you did and it'll never motivate you to do it yourself.

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  • > Your next interview won't be testing your AI skills

    Not that I disagree with your overall point, but have you interviewed recently? 90% of companies I interacted with required (!) AI skills, and me telling them how exactly I "leverage" it to increase my productivity.

  • > Professionally you are downgrading

    It is the contrary!

    You learn using a very powerfool tool. This is a tool, like text editor and compiler.

    But you focus on the logic and function more instead of syntax details and whims of the computer languages used in concert.

    The analogy from construction is to be elevated from being a bricklayer to an engineer. Or using various shaped shovels with wheelbarrel versus mechanized tools like excavators and dumpers in making earthworks.

    ... of course for those the focus is in being the master of bricklayers, which is noble, no pun intended, saying with agreeing straight face, bricklaying is a fine skill with beautiful outputs in their area of use. For those AI is really unnecessary. An existential threat, but unnecessary.

    • I agree with you, syntax details are not important but they haven't been important for a long time due to better editors and linters.

      > But you focus on the logic and function more instead of syntax details and whims of the computer languages used in concert.

      This is exactly my point. I learned logical mistakes when my first if else broke. Only reason you or I can guide these into good logic is because we dealt with bad ones before all this. I use claude myself a lot because it saves me time. But we're building a culture where no one ever reads the code, instead we're building black boxes.

      Again you could see it as the next step in abstraction but not when everyone's this dependent on a few companies prepared to strip the world of its skills so they can sell it back to them.

Jarred (from Bun) said that a lot of the errors are being of how much they've scaled in users recently (i.e., the flock that came from OpenAI)

keeps going down. One more time and I'm moving to Codex. Or hell, I better go back to using my actual brain and coding, god forbid. Fml.

  • Please relearn to use your brain.

    I cannot imagine how you can properly supervise an LLM agent if you can't effectively do the work yourself, maybe slightly slower. If the agent is going a significant amount faster than you could do it, you're probably not actually supervising it, and all kinds of weird crap could sneak in.

    Like, I can see how it can be a bit quicker for generating some boilerplate, or iterating on some uninteresting API weirdness that's tedious to do by hand. But if you're fundamentally going so much faster with the agent than by hand, you're not properly supervising it.

    So yeah, just go back to coding by hand. You should be doing tha probably ~20% of the time anyhow just to keep in practice.

    • Kind of agreed. I like vibe coding as "just" another tool. It's nice to review code in IDE (well, VSCode), make changes without fully refactoring, and have the AI "autocomplete". Interesting, sometimes way faster + easier to refactor by hand because of IDE tooling.

      The ways that agents actually make me "faster" are typically: 1. more fun to slog through tedious/annoying parts 2. fast code review iterations 3. parallel agents

I hope they improve their incident response comms in the future. 2.5 hours with nothing more than "We are continuing to investigate this issue" is pretty poor form. Their past history of incident handling looks just as bad.

  • They're waiting for claude to get up so they can use it to investigate why claude is down.

I was having an extended incognito chat with claude.ai, and then it stopped responding. I saved the transcript in a notepad and checked in another tab whether it was down. i wonder if the incognito session is gone, and whether by reposting it i can resurrect it. I have done so with Gemini but there it has codes like "Gemini said", which I do not see here. If anyone knows that, appreciate a solution.

I'm basing my next projects on the ability of Claude code to write code for me. This disruptions are scary.

  • That's a pretty bad idea. No matter how good a product is, never become so reliant on it that it seriously affects things that matter if it becomes unavailable.

This comes as reminder that software engineering is way more than generating code.

We build systems that can fail in unpredictable ways, and without knowing the system we built deeply is hard to understand what's going on.

Seems to be the biggest outage yet. Might be related to power loss events in UAE timing is suspicious as more datacenters appear to be hit.

  • If you look at their status page, something has been bubbling for the past week

    https://status.claude.com

    • Never noticed it being outright down like this except for today (and yesterday), never had actual downtime except for few failed requests that worked after a retry which coincides with AWS datacenters going offline.

  • A not particularly large AWS region on the other side of the world? Doubt it.

    • well there has been pretty large deals going on in UAE especially when it comes to AI since they can get any power capacity with a flick of their fingers for an unbeatable price and the latency in AI doesn't really matter since the first token is usually seconds anyway. And it's not just AWS it's the entire region.

This right now today is making the case for OSS AI and local inference. 200$/m to get rate limited makes a RTX 6000 Pro look cheap.

  • How well do local OSS models stack up to Claude?

    • Much better than they did half a year ago, but a single RTX 6000 won't get you there

      Models in the 700B+ category (GLM5, Kimi K2.5) are decent, but running those on your own hardware is a six-figure investment. Realistic for a company, for a private person instead pick someone you like from openrouter's list of inference providers.

      If you really want local on a realistic budget, Qwen 3.5 35B is ok. But not anywhere near Claude Opus

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    • Very well for narrowly scoped purposes.

      They decohere much faster as the context grows. Which is fine, or not, depending on whether you consider yourself a software engineer amplifying your output by automating the boilerplate, or an LLM cornac.

  • What’s the depreciation on that RTX 6000 though?

    New hardware keeps on coming with large gains in performance.

They need to keep an emergency backup Claude to fix the production Claude when it goes down.

(More seriously I wonder if they'd consider using Openai or Gemini for this purpose)

No wonder. It's performance overall was noticeably, like it had regressed to coding models from 1.5 years ago. I've try not to use claude during peak US hours because it tends to struggle more then with reasoning and correctness it seems than off hours.

I've been noticing elevated stupidity.

"Do this"

"User wants me to [do complete opposite]"

Seems not to be as capable as a month ago.

Who fixes the Ai when the Ai is down? Semi serious since they're pretty big on not writing code?

  • Maybe network guys can give some hints? I guess they encounter such issue relatively often, when they can't access network equipment by network to fix the network issue. I know management consoles have separate networks on datacenter scale but it isn't that easy with even bigger networks.

  • I know you say "semi serious" but you can't seriously think there isn't an LLM for internal usage only in Anthropic, right.

“98.92 % uptime” is horrendous and unacceptable.

Only one 9 of availability means you are seriously unreliable.