Comment by prologic
1 day ago
What happens one day when there is a significant outage of Claude or Codex and reliance on these tools as SaaS services is so great that it start to impact productivity and work? Will we just pack up our tools and go home?
My real world experience of this is that people prefer not to code by hand because it feels wasteful relative to agent speeds, so they find non-coding productive activities such as code/documentation review or usability testing.
You jest, but companies have sent people home fully paid, because power or internet were down and would be down for an extended period of time. Technically a small number could have kept working on white-boarding design topics, but without access to documentation, existing tickets, it would have been minimally effective.
It's not clear if or when these tools become as essential as power or internet to a developers or admins work, but if they do? Giving everyone a quarter day off at least generates some good-will, unlike forcing them to sit around unproductively because of working hours.
What would you do if there is a significant outage in AWS or GCP or Github or JIRA or any other service you use at work? same goes for AI tools as well.
If both of them are down at the same time, I would switch to my Kimi or GLM subscription and keep working. If they fail too, I switch to any number of providers via OpenRouter.
While there is some lock-in for the hardest tasks, for most of what people do LLMs are rapidly becoming a commodity.
In fact, right this minute I have Opus benchmarking Kimi alongside itself to determine which workflows we'll switch to using Kimi by default and Opus as the fallback instead of vice versa. It has already conceded Kimi does better on several tasks.
To me it doesn't sound so "economically convenient" to pay extra usage to alternative providers while someone pays 20/100/200 dollars for their service.
The subs for those alternative providers have similar tiering but more generous token allocations than Anthropic and OpenAI, and deliver good enough quality to be worth it.
If I needed to fall back on OpenRouter, it'd be paid per token, of course, but that'd take 4 major providers being down, in which case I suspect I'll have more critical things to worry about.
As it is, I use more than I could with a single $200 Claude Max subscription anyway, so I distribute my tasks across multiple providers.
Even without that it's cheap insurance given the cost of lost time.
You... wouldn't just code yourself if they were down?
If my laptop breaks I'm not going back to pen and paper, I'm buying a new/different laptop.
No more than when they are up, no. Why would I? I can produce far more by having tasks running in the background while I do other work.
Wouldn't know how
6 replies →
Those are your tools and if the AI companies have their way, they will be your only tools. Complete dependence on AI is the goal here.
Yeah. Just like how half the Internet shuts down every time there's an AWS outage, or how nothing gets done if the power or Internet is out
You mean like GitHub?
easy, we will switch to OpenRouter et al.
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